The Mum Sale the Principal Shut Down

The principal walked into our prayer circle at ten minutes to seven on a Tuesday morning, and he did not take off his sunglasses.

There were eleven teenagers on folding chairs in the fellowship hall of Gower Flats First Baptist, heads bowed, hands joined. It was a gray October morning in Oklahoma with a cold wind pushing at the windows, and the whole room smelled like burnt coffee and the glue gun I had left plugged in overnight. On every table behind us sat a mum.

I should explain that, because a homecoming mum in this part of the country is nothing like a grocery-store chrysanthemum. It is a wearable monster the size of a dinner platter, built from silk flowers and ribbon, with streamers hanging to the knees and cowbells and charms and a name in glitter across the middle. A girl pins hers to her shoulder for the homecoming game and rings like a sleigh when she walks. A grandmother keeps hers on a nail in the kitchen for the rest of her life.

We had one hundred and forty of them built and boxed that morning. We needed six hundred.

“Mrs. Varner,” the principal said from the doorway.

Doyle did not call me Birdie, though he had known me since the fourth grade, when he was a ninth grader at the back of the bus who let me borrow his pencil. I am forty-six, my name is Birdie Rainey Varner, and I have led the youth group at that church for eleven years. Doyle had been principal of Gower Flats High School for nine of them, and I had never seen him walk into my church on a weekday.

“Doyle,” I said. “Come in. We’re about to say amen.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, which sounded like a courtesy and was not. He stood very still, holding a single sheet of paper like a man at a graveside. A tall, pressed man in a district polo, with a white pickup running in the lot.

Kaylee, the student council president and the loudest voice in the circle, said the amen for all of them, and I watched her open her eyes and see him standing there.

“Good morning, Mr. Doyle,” she said.

“Good morning, Kaylee. Everybody.” He did not smile. “Mrs. Varner, I need to hand you something.”

He held out the sheet. I took it. It was on district letterhead, one paragraph, signed in blue ink, and I read it standing in the middle of the room with eleven young people watching my face.

It said that, effective immediately, no homecoming merchandise or mums could be sold, advertised, taken on order, or distributed on district property or through district students by any outside organization. It said the district had an approved vendor for the season. It said students passing out order forms during the school day would be disciplined. It said the district appreciated the community’s generosity.

I read it twice. By the second time my hands were cold.

“Doyle,” I said. “This is Maddie’s fund.”

“I know what it is.”

“We have been selling mums on that lot the Saturday before homecoming for eleven years. Every year. You signed off on it yourself last fall.”

“Last year there wasn’t a vendor contract,” he said. “This year there is. I can’t have a church setting up tables in front of the building and undercutting it. It’s a liability issue. I’m sorry about Maddie. I truly am. There are other ways to help her.”

“Such as?”