The Mum Sale the Principal Shut Down

“A donation jar at the front office, perhaps. I’d be glad to approve that.”

I looked at the one hundred and forty mums on the tables. I looked at the number Colt had written in marker on butcher paper on the wall, big enough to read from the back of the room. Six hundred.

“Charity is a wonderful thing, Mrs. Varner,” Doyle said, in a voice as even as a ruler. “It just needs to come through the front office.”

Then he nodded to the children, said, “Have a blessed day,” and walked out. I heard the pickup door shut. I heard it pull away.

Nobody in that fellowship hall spoke. A boy named Tyson let out a shaky breath. Kaylee, who is not a girl who cries, stood with her jaw set and her eyes full, looking at the door.

And I did the thing I am least proud of from that entire fall. I opened my mouth to say something about Doyle that I would have had to ask the Lord to forgive before dinner.

Then I looked at the faces of those eleven kids, who were watching me to see what grown people do when somebody shuts a door in their faces. I closed my mouth. It cost me, but I closed it.

“All right,” I said. “Sit down a minute. We’re not done praying.”

What the number was for

I want you to know about Maddie, because everything that happened over the next seventeen days was for her, and I do not want her to be a name in a story about grown people arguing.

Maddie is sixteen, a freckled, quick-witted junior who has sat in my youth group since the seventh grade. She plays the clarinet badly and with total commitment. She has her mother Shanna’s laugh, a big honk that makes the whole cafe turn around. Last March she came home from a basketball game with a fever and a bruise that would not fade, and two weeks later a doctor in Oklahoma City, two and a half hours from our door, told Shanna it was leukemia. It is the kind of sickness children have a good chance of beating, but the road is long: treatment at the children’s hospital for the better part of two years, on a schedule that does not care about a paycheck.

Shanna waits tables at the Corner Cafe and raises Maddie alone, in a rental house on Pecan Street, with no family within a hundred miles. She drove that long road again and again and slept in a hospital chair. By September the gas alone cost more than the rent, and she had missed three weeks of work. She never said a word to us. Colt heard it from her neighbor and came home and said, “Birdie, that girl is going under.”

That was when the youth group voted.

I put the question to the youth group one Wednesday night in August: what can we do for Maddie? A boy said, “Mums,” and then everybody talked at once. We had sold mums on the school lot for years, because that corner is where the whole town passes on game day. The Saturday sale there usually brought in about a hundred and twenty at thirty dollars apiece. If we sold six hundred, we would clear eighteen thousand dollars, every cent for gas and motel rooms and rent.

Six hundred mums. In a town of twenty-one hundred people.

The mission fund had paid for the ribbon and silk flowers, and the Wednesday night offering covered the bells, so every mum was thirty clean dollars of Maddie’s gas money. Colt did the arithmetic on a bulletin, shook his head, and said, “Well, I suppose we find out what Gower Flats is made of.”

We built them in the evenings, a dozen kids and four ladies from the quilting circle and me, hot-gluing ribbon until our fingertips peeled. We had one hundred and forty done by that Tuesday, with eleven days left to build the other four hundred and sixty.

And now Doyle had come into my church with a sheet of paper.