The porches
Here is what I had not prepared for. The word had gotten ahead of us.
Mrs. Ebling, I found out later, had called Marcella Pelham at number four, and Marcella had called Doris Ebert, and Doris had called somebody at the Lutheran church, and by the time Paige reached house number five, the porch lights were on and the doors were already open.
They came out in housecoats and Carhartt jackets and one man in his pajama pants and a Packers stocking cap. They stood on their steps like people waiting for a parade, and when Paige came up the walk each of them said her name. It was just her name, the way you greet someone coming home from a hospital.
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Marcella Pelham walked out to the sidewalk and hugged her. Paige held the bag out to the side so nothing would crush, and over Marcella’s shoulder I saw her face. She was crying, finally, quietly, with her chin up.
“I told him at the Kwik Trip that you’d never quit,” Marcella said into her hair. “I said that girl has not missed a Saturday in three years. He just looked at his coffee.”
“Who did?” Paige asked.
“Never mind, honey,” Marcella said. “Go on. You’ve got a lot of houses.”
Eleven of the fourteen were home that morning. Each one read the line at the bottom of her note and said nearly the same sentence: He came by, I paid him, and I thought it was for you. All eleven paid her again, and not one had to be asked.
Harriet Lund, at number twenty, a woman who lives on a widow’s pension and has never once been late with her twenty-six dollars, went inside and came back with exact change and a plate of lefse wrapped in foil.
By half past nine Paige had $286 in the inside pocket of her jacket. She had never carried so much money in her life.
She stopped at the Lutheran church, at house number thirty-one, and she sat down on the low stone wall by the parking lot with her hand pressed to her left side. I was out of the car before the door had closed.
“It’s my side,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt. It just feels like somebody’s holding it.”
“Then we stop. We go home.”
“Mom, no.” She looked up at me, her cheeks flushed from the cold. “Please. I need a minute. I wrote it on a sticky note. Take a break at the church.”