The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

He stood in the yard for forty minutes. Aldene timed it.

He tried the front steps once, and Marcene Pennock slid her chair a few inches left, and he stopped. “Mrs. Sorley,” he said, “I believe we have a ten o’clock closing.”

Leota stood. It took her a while. She held the porch rail with one hand, and when she was upright she spoke in a voice I had never heard come out of her.

“Mr. Penhallow, you are welcome to sit. Nobody here has to stand. There is coffee. But my husband poured the floor of that cellar with his bare hands, and you are not welcome to sign.”

Brice looked at Bettylou, in her good brown coat. For the first time since March, something crossed his face that was not business.

“I am sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, very quietly.

Then he walked back to his truck and sat in it with the door shut and the engine off. The notary got out and walked home. Brice stayed an hour.

At two that afternoon Leota’s mailbox held her agreement, torn neatly in half and then in half again. There was no note.

After that the yellow signs came down, not all at once but the way leaves do, a few a day. The Silverado took to parking outside the Dairy Barn at night with its lights off. Aldene’s opera glasses told me he slept in it twice.

Over the next weeks three more of the widows with cards decided to sell, and they did it properly. Each waited her fourteen days. Each had a woman sitting beside her.

In four weeks Brice Penhallow did not buy a single house in Tarwater.

Two of the six houses on my deeds had already been resold to buyers from out of town. The other four sat empty on their streets with the curtains still hanging.

Bettylou’s was one. I drove past it every Sunday, and the roses she planted by the steps had gone to sticks.

I wanted the women paid, and I did not want a court. My widows were seventy-nine and eighty-two and eighty-eight years old, and a court moves too slowly for women who count their time in winters.

What I wanted was for him to sit in a kitchen and say the numbers to their faces.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, my telephone rang. It was Bettylou Mundt, who had never called me in her life.

She said, in a flat, clear voice, that she had kept the business card he left on her doorstep in March, and that she had used it.

“Bettylou,” I said, “what did you tell him?”

“That there is a table. Thursday at ten, at yours. I told him to bring everything he has.” She was quiet. “I hope that is all right.”

I said it was. I did not sleep that night.

On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, ten women sat in my kitchen with coffee nobody was drinking.

Aldene sat at the head of the table, in the chair Dewitt used to take. Marcene sat at her left with her thermos.

Leota was there, and Ila, and Dorcas, and Clarabel, and Vesta Kimbrough, Pauline Oberg, and Edna Mae Dupree. At the far end sat Bettylou, her good brown coat still on and her purse in her lap.