The Mum Sale the Principal Shut Down

The price of a mum

I told the kids I did not know what we would do, and I made them eat the donuts, because nobody does anything hard on an empty stomach and I believe that is scriptural. Kaylee asked the question that stayed with me. “It’s the same sale, for a kid in his own school. Why would he care about a vendor?”

I had no answer, but I had one by lunch, because Shanna called me from the walk-in cooler at the cafe, where she goes when she wants to cry in private.

“Do you know who the vendor is?” she asked. I did not.

“It’s Ronnie’s shop in the county seat, Prairie Rose Floral. Ronnie and Doyle played tight end together at this very school. He was in Doyle’s wedding.” She laughed, a small, ugly laugh that did not sound like her. “Ronnie lost his big grocery account and they were three months from closing, and then Doyle signed the district’s exclusive contract with him in August. Birdie, he sells his mums for seventy-five dollars.”

I did not say anything. I stood in the church kitchen with the phone against my ear.

“Same size. Same bells. The district gets a ten-dollar cut. And ours are thirty.”

“That’s the whole thing,” Shanna said. “It isn’t about a rule. Six hundred cheaper mums on his own parking lot would have sunk his friend’s whole season.”

Most cruelty in a small town is not dramatic. It looks like a rule, and a man in a pressed polo with a signed letter and an even voice who says he is sorry. The people who do the most damage are almost never villains in their own minds. They are loyal. They have decided that a friend’s seventy-five dollars matters more than a sick girl’s thirty, and they have found a sentence that lets them say so without saying it.

I was so angry that I could hear my own pulse.