Mrs Cannon's Tip

Mrs. Cannon’s Tip
(a small short story by Phil Rice)

“Bart Wright, call 76; Bart, seven-six.” He liked being paged over the intercom. It sounded official and important. The other employees all knew it just meant some manager was looking for him, but he figured the shoppers might be impressed. When he heard it while folding shirts in the men’s department—a particularly distasteful task—he found a phone and dialed 76 in short order.

The receptionist informed him that he was to carry Mrs. Cannon’s furs to her car. This was good news for Bart because carrying furs usually meant a tip. Burr’s Department Store catered to a clientele that included some of Nashville’s most upscale citizens, and not just the country music stars, either. There were plenty of middle-class shoppers, too, but they didn’t have their furs stored, so Bart figured a good tip was likely. The managers at Burr’s Department Store made it no secret that such tasks were reserved for the better workers, and Bart felt a tug of pride as he hustled up to the second floor where the furs for sale were kept chained and bound and the furs in storage were kept in special air-conditioned vaults. There was usually an undercover store detective hovering around, too, pretending to be a customer, which Bart always found amusing.

Mrs. Cannon, wearing a pink tennis outfit with matching shoes and a tiny pink purse, was standing by the register with three neatly packaged boxes and a fretful looking department manager by her side. Trying hard not to look at the undercover detective peeking from behind a rack of leather sports coats, Bart acknowledged the manager’s brief introduction and apologized for his tardiness even though he had responded as quickly as possible. Then with an air of seriousness he lifted the boxes and followed Mrs. Cannon to the escalator.

Lanky and slim with a head of thick, shoulder-length hair that gave him the appearance of a walking dust mop, Bart accentuated his slight but athletic build by wearing t-shirts pressed tightly against his thin torso. As the escalator descended toward the parking level, he held the boxes at the end of his arms to better show off his lean muscles. The “juniors” department where the girls shopped was at the bottom of the escalator, and he wanted to be ready. But he found himself oddly distracted by Mrs. Cannon. She seemed familiar, like maybe a great aunt or family friend he might’ve met once.

“Where do you go to school?” she asked with genuine interest. As had become his habit, he answered the question in his deepest voice, trying to sound older than his seventeen years. Upon hearing the name of his school, she offered a word of praise and mentioned a couple of her friends who had children at that very same high school. It was a fairly big school, so he didn’t feel awkward telling her that he was not familiar with those names.

The escalator delivered them to the ground floor, but for once he didn’t scan the junior’s department for the girls; he just listened to the lady in the pink tennis outfit tell him about how much she liked the people at Burr’s and how wonderful it was to have such fine neighbors. He opened the doors to the outside with his left arm as he held the boxes in his right. With a big smile she gently protested that his arms were too full to be holding the door but she stepped through graciously. His senses told him that she was a woman who didn’t question a young man’s awkward attempts at being a gentleman, unlike the angry feminist who had chewed him out for an identical effort earlier that week.

They found her automobile and she unsnapped her dainty purse to retrieve three one-dollar bills. “I always give a dollar for each box; I hope that’s enough,” she said with a warm smile and a sincere desire to be slightly more than fair.

“Oh yes ma’am, that’s just fine,” Bart replied with a nervous nod of his head, nervous because now he knew why she seemed so familiar. He didn’t think to open the car door for the lady as he stuck the cash in his pocket and returned to the store, anxious to tell his friends.

He would live for several years after that brief encounter, his being a simple life that eventually wound down in a hospital room just a few city blocks from where Mrs. Cannon herself had died six years previous. One night, as Bart lay motionless in his tightly tucked hospital bed, a television was blaring music from somewhere down the sterile hallway. The only sound Bart recognized was a voice shouting something about the Grand Ole Opry. “Must be Saturday,” he thought.

As the realization that he would leave his body before he left the hospital entered his weary mind, he felt the presence of a hospice nurse tending to his last physical needs. She was sweet and kind, always smiling with her eyes as well as her lips, and that made him think of Mrs. Cannon. How powerful and profound a simple kindness can be, he silently mused as he returned to Burr’s Department Store, 1977, just for a moment.

He entertained many memories on that day, his dying day. Some were of family; some were of friends; some were of pilgrims chanced to meet; and one was of Minnie Pearl in a pink tennis dress, smiling with her eyes.