What he’d asked her at ten that morning was how much was in the notebook. She told him — forty-eight years of it, the whole running total, off the top of her head, because she’s never once had to look it up. He wrote the number on a napkin, said thank you for the coffee, and left a five under his cup like he has every Tuesday since 1994. By six on Friday there were maybe two hundred people in that lot. They’d been coming in all week to the bank, to the hardware store, to the church office — anybody who’d ever been carried in that notebook and anybody whose parents had. They paid it. All of it, plus a good deal more than all of it, and the banker walked in at ten past six with an envelope and set it on the counter next to her rag and said it was hers and not the diner’s and he’d already had a lawyer put that in writing.
She didn’t take it for about four minutes. She stood there with her hand flat on the counter and argued with a man about whether a tab that people paid was money she was owed, and he let her argue, and then he said the notebook was a forty-eight-year loan she’d made out of her own pocket at zero interest and the town had simply decided to settle up. That’s when she sat down on a stool for the first time I’ve ever seen during a shift.
The owner’s son came at half six because somebody had called him about the cars. He stood in his own doorway and couldn’t get in past the crowd. Nobody was rude to him. That was the worst part for him, I think — two hundred people being perfectly polite and not moving. Wanda handed him her key at the end of the night the way he’d asked, right there in front of everyone, and said there you go, honey, and the room went quiet, and then somebody at the back started clapping and it went on a long while.
