The Combine Across the Street

Then she looked across the lot at me, over her daughter’s head, and nodded once.

I nodded back.

I do not know her name. I have asked, and nobody knows it. She works the register at Marlow Foods, and I have been in twice since, and she rang me up both times with her eyes down, and the second time she slipped a free bar of chocolate into my bag without a word.

At 4:52, Zach put his thumb on the silver counter and clicked it one last time.

He walked over and held it up so we could all see the number.

“Three hundred twelve,” he said. Nobody said anything.

Then Tim loosened his bank tie, very slowly, and folded it into his pocket, and said, “Three hundred twelve children. I have managed this bank for twenty-six years, and that is the most people I have ever had in this lot.”

“Even the day we gave out the free calendars?” said Curtis. “Even then.”

Owen was sitting on the edge of the empty wagon by then, with his corn head in his lap. His hands were gray with chocolate and wrapper dust. His face was sunburned from the afternoon.

“Mom?” he said. “Yeah, buddy.” “Is it okay that I ran out?” I sat down on the pavement beside him in front of the whole town.

“You did not run out,” I said. “You started with ninety-six. Three hundred twelve children got one, and some got one for a brother.”

He did the math slowly, with his lips moving. “So most of them came from other people.”

“Most of them.” “Because they heard me ask.” “That’s right.” He leaned his head on my arm. The paper towel auger tipped sideways and tickled my ear.

“Grandpa would’ve liked that,” he said. I pulled him in close, and I did not say anything for a while, because I did not trust my voice.

We packed up at five.

Owen fell asleep in the back seat of my car with the corn head still on. I carried him in at six, box and all, and laid him on top of his bedspread with his sneakers still on, and I took off one shoe and let the other one be.

That was Saturday. Amber texted me at nine that night. It said, in full: “You humiliated me in front of the whole town.”

I read it standing at the kitchen counter, with the dishwasher running and the cat winding around my ankles.

I wrote back, “He had ninety-six bars and a place to stand. That was all he wanted.”

Then I put the phone face down and did not pick it up again until the morning, and she had not answered.

On Monday night, the school board met.

It was the regular meeting, the first Monday, in the library at the junior-senior high. I had not planned to go. Curtis said we should, in the quiet way he says things that matter, and I put on my good coat and left Owen with his grandmother Connie.