The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

He stared at her. “Mrs. Mundt, I do not think I could.”

“I did not ask what you could do,” Bettylou said. “I asked what you will do.”

It was the longest silence of the morning. Then, with a hand that was not steady, he reached for the knife beside the pound cake.

He cut a slice and ate it. He told us afterward that it was the first thing he had tasted all month.

All six closings were signed by the second week of December. The Kenyons bought Bettylou’s house, and Mireya Kenyon cried in the front hall at the sight of the curtains still hanging. Bettylou had left them up on purpose.

She did not move back. She was eighty-two and had had her fill of stairs.

She took her eighty-four thousand six hundred dollars and bought a one-bedroom unit at the new senior apartments, with a window facing the creek, and planted her roses in a window box.

Brice Penhallow went home with every dollar he put into those houses, and his receipts, and twenty-four thousand dollars besides. A lot of people said that was too kind. I said so myself, in my kitchen, the night after the last closing.

Here is where I came out. A court would not have handed those women four hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars. A court would have handed them a docket number and a seventy-nine-year-old’s chance of living to see the end.

What paid them was a ninety-one-year-old teacher, a blue casserole dish, eleven chairs on a porch, and a man who could not stand to be looked at.

He still comes on Thursdays. He did not stop when the last closing was signed, and none of us has asked why. He sits in the chair by the door and does not talk much, and Aldene gives him the first slice.

I do not know if he is a good man. I know he is a man who has to look at Bettylou Mundt every week. I do not think that is a small thing.

I do not think it is large enough either, and I will not pretend it is. A reason is not a permission, and Aldene has never let me forget it.

There are one hundred and one cards in Tarwater now. I made forty more in December for women whose husbands died after October, and I will keep making them as long as my hands work.

They hang on refrigerators under magnets shaped like corn and cardinals and the state of Kentucky.

I made one for myself. It hangs on my own refrigerator, the same heavy card in the same careful hand. It says “What Your House Is Worth,” and my name, and 4 Alder Street, and a number, one hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars.

Under the number, in smaller letters, I wrote one more line, in January’s honor. “Not for sale. The furnace clicks on at three, and I have learned to say good morning to it.”

Aldene read it last Thursday. She tapped it once with her finger and said, “Good.” And then she told me to put the kettle on, because it was five minutes to ten, and somebody was already on the back step.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.