The Boy Who Sold the Most Popcorn

Tom read on through the fortieth sheet and past it. When he reached the forty-fourth, in the short last row at the edge of the table, he slowed down.

It was the one sheet I could not have left out of that binder.

He picked it up. He read it silently first. Then he took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, and put them back on.

“This one’s in pencil,” he said. His voice had changed. “Customer, L. Eckhardt. Eckhardt Road. Two small tins of caramel corn, twenty-five dollars.” He stopped. He cleared his throat. “Under the signature it says, For Walt’s pack.”

Nobody in that room under sixty knew what that meant. Everybody over sixty did.

“Lois Eckhardt,” Tom said. “Walt was Cubmaster here for nineteen years. I was in his pack.

I was a Bear in this basement in nineteen sixty-four.” He looked across the room, and I saw him find the little wolf head hanging on my son’s neckerchief. “Eli. Come up here a minute, son.”

Eli got up off the floor. He walked up the aisle with his shoulders pulled in tight, the way a child walks toward a thing he’s afraid is going to hurt.

I stepped up beside him when he reached the table.

“That’s Walt’s wolf,” Tom said, very quietly. “Where did you get that?”

“Mrs. Eckhardt gave it to me,” Eli said. “In the sleet. She said a wolf should be worn by a boy who’s out in the weather.”

Tom Haas, who has delivered mail through blizzards, who sat in the hospital waiting room the night his wife died and never once let a stranger see his face, took a long breath and looked at the ceiling for a second.

“She would say that,” he said. “That’s exactly what she’d say.”

He set down the pink sheet. He laid his big, spotted hand on the top of my son’s head, lightly, for a breath, and he did not say anything else to him.

Then he turned and looked at the woman sitting behind the cash box.

“Kristen,” he said. “Open the box.”

Kristen did not move. For a long moment she sat with her palm flat on the gray lid, and I could see the knuckles. Then, slowly, as if the box were hot, she lifted her hand off it.

Tom reached over and flipped the latch. Inside was a tray of loose ones and fives, a rubber-banded roll of quarters, and a few checks made out to the pack.

He counted it with two fingers, the way he used to count a bundle of mail, and then he counted it again.

“Two hundred thirty-one dollars,” he said. “Forty-six orders from Eli. Eleven hundred forty.” He did not make it a question. “Where is it, Kris?”

“I was going to put it back.” Her voice was very small, and she said it to the box, not to him. “I was going to put it all back by Friday. It’s payday Friday.”

Nobody spoke. Nobody in that basement moved a chair.

“Put what back?” Tom said.

She told him, in short pieces, with long gaps between. Her husband had left in August and taken the checkbook with him.