The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

He looked at Bettylou. “The man who bought her lot built on it and sold it eleven months later for one hundred and ninety thousand. I looked it up. I never told her.”

“I did not decide to be that man,” he said. “I decided I would never again be the one at the kitchen table who did not know the number. I thought the only way to be safe was to be the one holding the pen. So I learned the numbers, and the pound cake, and how to sit, and I used all of it exactly the way it was used on her.”

Bettylou had not taken her eyes off him. “Did your mother ever know what you did for a living?”

He shut his eyes. “She died thinking I sold insurance.”

Then Aldene Crowder said, in a voice I could have heard at the back of any schoolroom, “Mr. Penhallow, that is a reason. I have taught eight grades and heard a great many reasons. A reason is not a permission.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I have known since Friday on Mrs. Sorley’s porch. I sat in my truck and watched a woman with a cane tell me her husband poured a floor, and I heard my mother say the same kind of thing about a kitchen table. I do not have an excuse. I have a folder.”

Bettylou turned the page. Under the yellow sheet lay a stack of closing statements, one for each of the six houses, and on every one, in his small neat hand, was the same arrangement.

For the four he still held, each house would be sold through Marcene Pennock’s paperwork to a family from my list, at what it was worth. He would take back every dollar he had paid, plus his receipts for repairs, plus four thousand dollars flat for his trouble.

Everything above that would go to the woman who had sold it. Not to a fund, not to a lawyer. To her.

For the two he had already resold, Dorcas’s and Clarabel’s, he would write each a check for the difference out of what he had been paid. Sixty-five thousand three hundred for Dorcas. Seventy-one thousand two hundred for Clarabel.

The total was on the last page. Four hundred and twenty-seven thousand seven hundred dollars, paid back out of the very houses he had taken.

“Tulsa wants three hundred and eighty thousand from me by the first of December,” he said. “I borrowed it at thirteen percent and have carried it since spring. I told myself I was one good month from clear.” He almost smiled.

“I was about ten days from losing everything I own. That is not why I came. But I would be lying if I said it was not one of the things that got me here.”

“That,” said Aldene, “is the first true thing you have said about money.”

“I know it.”

Bettylou closed the folder. She looked down the table at the other nine women. Nobody said a word, and I realized she was asking them something and they were answering with their faces.

“I have a condition,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Orrin and I had Thursday coffee at a kitchen table for forty-nine years. You will come to this one. Every Thursday at ten, until the last closing is signed, and you will sit in that chair by the door and eat Aldene’s pound cake.”