The Widow’s Mite
By Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
I now know what it’s like to be poor and hungry; I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of mercy.
Once a week, every week, for the past few years, I go through the same process of reasoning myself into leaving my farm place, my backwoods paradise in Southeast Georgia, to travel thirty miles into Valdosta to shop for groceries: My husband does most of our shopping, but it’s not fair for him to have to do it all. I drive a new luxury car; I have money-enough. I’m healthy and fit as a sixty-two year old woman can be, and I have no physical disfigurements that would make me shy away from public places. Actually, I like being with people, real people, most of the time, so I’m not agoraphobic, only jaded. And frankly, I can no longer stand the spoiled privileged upper-class who shops where I shop on the right side of town.
So, this week I went to the wrong side of town, to a supermarket where the underclass shops—soul food, soul prices, soul people—and where, I have to admit, one of my friends had the back glass of her car knocked out for a cheap radio, not even stereo.
Shopping cart full, I was in and out of the supermarket before I even caught a rumor of wrong-doing. Going fine. See, my car hadn’t been broken into, I told myself as I unloaded my groceries from the cart to my car trunk.
It was after noon. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast at six that morning. Across the broken blacktop of the large parking lot, I could see a small fast-food chicken and biscuit place. My favorite food—fried chicken.
Just pushing through the heavy glass door, I could smell chicken frying, a fragrance that always takes me back to my childhood days of Bible school and coming home to my mother frying chicken in her yellow kitchen.
Two miserably obese black ladies were ahead of me in line. Their order got passed across the counter, and the weight of those piled plates multiplied by, say, one hundred, one-hundred days a year for maybe forty years, you could understand how they got to be so heavy. Simple math!
A big-eyed dark girl with level white teeth, wearing a name tag that read “Kristan,” was waiting behind the counter, trimmed nails poised over the computer keyboard. I stepped up to place my order—a chicken-biscuit sandwich and a medium unsweet tea.
While she tapped in my order, I pulled out a credit card.
She said, “We don’t take credit cards. Sorry.”
“What about a check?” I asked.
“Sorry. Just cash, all we take.”
I laughed while unzipping the change compartment of my slim black purse. I knew I didn’t have enough. Even when I have money, I seldom have cash. Long ago, I quit carrying cash because I tended to give it all away.
“Okay,” I said, counting out nickels and dimes amounting to sixty cents, then four ancient tarnished pennies, probably picked up in front of a convenience store while filling my car with gas, to show my disgust with shoppers who trash pennies rather than pocket them.
“Guess I’ll just have a small tea,” I said.
Kristan shook her head, studying my face. “That a dollar-twenty for small tea,” she said.
“Oh, okay.” I left my change on the counter as if to prove I had something, or to prevent putting it back in my purse since it wouldn’t buy even a small tea.