“Thrilling,” Teddy says, and she laughs.
“Believe it or not, it is. To me, anyway. All of it is.”
This makes him smile. Just last week Leo and I went with them to see the progress on the new place, the two of us hanging back as they stepped around piles of wooden planks to stand in the very spot where they used to live. I know they must’ve been thinking about the way their lives have unfolded since then, the way things changed for the worse, and then—just as suddenly—for the better.
“Thank you,” Katherine said, drawing Teddy into a hug. Then she looked over his shoulder at me with tears in her eyes. “Thank you both.”
Now she grabs the keys to their new home from the counter. “Don’t forget I’m heading to the hospital afterward,” she tells Teddy, waving as she closes the door. “But I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
When she’s gone Leo turns to Teddy. “I thought she was cutting back her hours.”
“She did. And no more nights.” He shrugs. “I keep telling her she can quit altogether, but she doesn’t want to.”
“She loves what she does,” I remind them. “She’s lucky.”
But Teddy is no longer listening. His attention has shifted to the TV, which has been on in the background with the volume turned low. It’s tuned to a morning show, where the host, a man with jet-black hair and a deep tan, is doing an interview with a woman who sits nervously on the couch opposite him, her leg jangling.
“Turn it up!” Teddy says, so loudly and so suddenly that Leo drops the wooden spoon he was about to toss into a box. “Where’s the remote?”
“I don’t know.” I scan all the usual hiding spots, which are in various states of disarray. “Why?”
“Because,” Teddy says, dropping to his knees in front of the couch and fishing around underneath it. He emerges with the remote and aims it at the TV, punching at the volume button so many times that the people on screen are now practically shouting at us.
“Teddy,” Leo and I both say at the same time, covering our ears.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, lowering it again. “Butlook.”
I squint at the screen, trying to figure out what exactly I’m supposed to be looking at, but it’s not until I hear the woman sayfarmers marketthat I realize who she is.
“Whoa,” I say, moving closer to the TV. “That’s the chicken lady.”
“Do you really think you should be calling her that?” Teddy teases me, but I just wave a hand to shush him, moving closer to the screen.
“I thought it was a mistake at first, so I didn’t do anything for a while,” she’s saying. She looks different with all the makeup, older somehow, more grown-up. But it’s definitely her, and she’s definitely talking about Teddy. “I thought someone left it by accident or that I’d get in trouble if I spent it, because they might want it back. I couldn’t imagine anyone would do something like that for a complete stranger, you know?”
“You think she means you?” Leo asks, walking over to join us, so that we’re all three standing in a row in front of the TV, arms folded, eyes trained on the interview.
“How many other people do you think left her a thousand-dollar tip recently?” Teddy asks, though he’s smiling and his ears have turned pink.
“But then your mother took a turn for the worse…,” the host prompts her, and the chicken lady gives a slightly startled nod.
“Yes,” she says, blinking. “She wasn’t doing well, and I was having trouble paying for her hospice care, so I decided to use it.” She ducks her head for a second, then looks up at the camera through glassy eyes. “She died a week later.”
“I’m so sorry,” the anchorman says, reaching out to pat her hand in a brisk show of sympathy. “But then something very special happened, didn’t it?”
“Well, I decided to start volunteering at a hospice myself,” she says, sitting up a little straighter, and the anchor purses his lips.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, of course. Which is so admirable.Soadmirable. But can you tell us what happened the morning after your mother passed?”
The chicken lady nods. “Right. Sure. Well, it had been a really hard night, and I needed to get out, so I drove to get some coffee the next morning. And even though I was sad, I kept thinking about how grateful I was that she got the care she needed that last week of her life, and how it wouldn’t have happened without the kindness of that stranger, and I wished I could pay it forward somehow.”
The anchor nods and gives her an encouraging look.
“But I don’t have that kind of money, obviously, and the only thing I could think to do in that moment was to buy a coffee for the person behind me in the drive-through. So I did. It wasn’t anything big. Nothing like that tip. But it was something, you know?”
“As it turned out, itwassomething,” the man says with a thousand-watt smile. “Something pretty big. Because after you did that, the person behind you was so grateful that they decided to do the same. And the person after that. And so on.”
The chicken lady nods. “I found out later that over six hundred people kept the chain going all day long.”
