He Priced Me At A Penny So I Married Another Chapter 38
I nodded.
I didn’t need to watch it being destroyed to know it would never be hung up again.
People quickly filled the repair table.
Carol assessed the tears; I handled registration. Some people recognized me and whispered nearby.
The woman who had once paid the one cent came, too.
She stood there alone for a long while before finally setting a thermos down on the corner of the table.
“The sleeve came loose.”
I looked at it.
“Please sign in first.”
She didn’t move.
“Lydia, that day I really thought they were just trying to give Derek a way out. Later, my son said I never should have put my hands on you.”
“The money was refunded. You see? Everyone already paid some kind of price.”
It was as if she wanted me to tell her it was all in the past.
I pushed the registration sheet toward her.
“You grabbed a stranger by the arm and tried to make her go home with your son. Whether Derek lied to you doesn’t change that.”
Her face reddened.
“So what else do you want from me?”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“You can register to have the thermos sleeve repaired, or you can leave.”
She stood there for a while longer. In the end, she wrote down her name and went to sit in the waiting area.
Carol took the thermos without a word.
She trimmed off the frayed thread, sewed the edge back up, and returned it in order when the woman’s turn came.
No one humiliated her, and no one brushed away her responsibility as a joke.
That afternoon, the organizer asked me to introduce the Sewing Room over the megaphone.
When I wrapped my hand around it, my palm still came away damp.
Wind blew in from the far side of the grass, and the display line swayed gently.
I didn’t mention the one-cent poster.
“If something is damaged, it doesn’t need to prove how much it’s worth first.”
“If you want to keep it, bring it here. We’ll do our best to help you mend it.”
When I finished, I handed the megaphone back to the staff member.
This time, the applause from the crowd wasn’t because someone had put a price on me.
I went back to the table and kept threading my needle.