The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

The busiest three feet in the county

My name is Verna, and for twenty-two years I ran the layaway counter at Haskell’s Five and Dime.

The store sat on the courthouse square in our town, between the bank and a cafe that changed hands every few years. We sold thread and galoshes and goldfish and penny candy and about everything in between.

The layaway counter was in the very back, past the bolts of fabric, under a bare bulb that buzzed all winter long.

Eleven months of the year it was the quietest corner in the building. I dusted shelves back there and read the paper and waited.

Then December would come, and that little counter became the busiest three feet of floor in the whole county.

Everybody in a farm town knows what layaway is, or they used to. You pick out the coat in October. You cannot pay for it yet. So the store holds it for you, and you pay it down a dollar or two at a time until it is yours.

I kept the whole thing in a green cloth ledger with a stub of pencil tied to it on a string.

Every child had a line. The coat, the price, the date, and then a little column where I wrote in each payment as it came.

Behind me ran a long shelf, and every bundle sat up there in brown paper and twine, the child’s name printed on the front in my own hand.

I could tell you whose was whose with my eyes shut. The Pruitt boy’s parka. The twins out on the Ridge Road and their matching red ones. Little Carla’s white boots with the fur around the top.

I was thirty when old Mr. Haskell put me back there. He said I had a patient way about me, and that layaway was ninety percent patience.

He was right about that. The dollars came slow, and some of them came hard.

I watched more than one mother count change out of a coffee can on that counter, nickels and dimes still cold from her coat pocket.

I never rushed a one of them. I would just wet the pencil and write it down and tell her she was getting close.