What he’d asked her on Wednesday, hat in his hand, flour on the counter between them, was how many funeral trays and how many she’d charged for. She said she didn’t keep count of the second number. He asked her to try. She said maybe six hundred over the years that she’d let go, maybe more, and that she’d covered them out of the bakery’s own numbers so nobody upstairs would have to have an opinion about it. He said thank you and put his hat back on and went and sat in his car in the lot for a while.
At six on Friday the intercom clicked and it was him, and he read out the number — six hundred and forty-one funerals in forty-six years — and then he said the store had been carrying a debt to Alma Reyes since 1979 and it was being settled today. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people in that store by then. They’d been coming in since three. He said the bakery would be called Alma’s from Monday, that the sign was already ordered, and that the trays would go on being made at cost, permanently, written into the store’s books as a standing line item so it never has to be somebody’s decision again.
She wouldn’t come out from behind the counter. She stood there with a sheet pan in her hands while people came back to her, one at a time, most of them saying the same thing in different words — my mother’s service, my husband’s, 1994, 2008, last March. A man in his sixties told her she’d made the tray for his father when he was eleven and that nobody in his family had known it was free until that afternoon.
The district manager was standing at the end of the frozen aisle for all of it. He didn’t say anything. Nobody was rude to him — that’s the part I keep thinking about, a hundred and fifty people being perfectly pleasant and simply not looking at him. Alma handed him her key card at close, right on schedule, and said there you go, sweetheart. The owner handed her a new one out of his coat pocket about four seconds later. Same door. Same four in the morning.
