The Henderson family moved to Burlington so that John could open another Dollar General. John already had a successful store in Limon, a store that still prospered after two years of operation. But because he wanted his family to continue to thrive, to have everything they’d ever dreamed of, he figured moving seventy-eight miles to the east was a good idea. You have to live in it, get your hands dirty, if you really want something to grow and thrive.
On the drive along I-70 through Colorado heading east toward Kansas, Marybelle, the daughter, watched fields of green stalks, growing tall and healthy and packed together. The cornfields she had always imagined and seen in movies have distinct rows—the sun and the earth winking rapidly between them as you drive by—but the cornfields of Colorado’s Eastern Plains are packed so tightly together that it’s difficult to make out anything individual.
They bought a house on Senter Avenue near the elementary school because it had only had two other owners in its past and cost enough money to be impressive. Janice, John’s wife, was worried about appearances, especially since they were sort of like invaders in the little town, coming from elsewhere and bringing their dollar store. Janice wanted to ensure that they had a yard big enough for entertaining and were centrally located so that it was obvious that they were community people. John made a pun about their new address: We’ll be at the Senter of everything! Janice rolled her eyes but secretly enjoyed the coincidence. The house on Senter Avenue was perfect for them with its peaked roof and burgundy paint on the outside, its glamorous white kitchen with its farmhouse sink and granite countertops on the inside.
They arrived the week of the Kit Carson County Fair. Marybelle was about to start her sophomore year at the time of the move, and when they did some digging, they realized she had missed cheerleading tryouts. What’s nice about these little towns of only a few thousand people is that when someone moves in, the neighbors come by with casseroles and pies to say hello and to poke their noses in to see how the house is being decorated, therefore “digging” really meant asking each new neighbor about Burlington High School sports. The neighbors were just tickled to talk about them, since Friday nights are for football. Fortunately, the cheerleading coach lived seven blocks away on 8th Street and was more than happy to give Marybelle a look. The team had lost a girl anyway because her family had up and moved to Goodland, a suggestion that the lost cheerleader had been impregnated by a football star.
The fair was dusty and hot, and the high school students rapidly spent far too much money on funnel cakes and barbecue. Marybelle, who was fortunate to look like her mother with long, blonde hair with a natural wave and bright celery eyes, had no problems meeting all of the most popular girls in her grade and the grade above, who welcomed her beauty and her charm and collected her into their circle. Within the week, Marybelle had friends and a cheerleading schedule. Within two, the girls were planning trips to Denver to go shopping for Homecoming dresses.
For the Hendersons, that August was a good one: they grew strong roots. Though they were tired from packing and moving, everything was going according to plan. Marybelle was not just an athlete, but was also recognized as an excellent student and tracked accordingly. She auditioned for the fall play, landed a leading role, and joined the Burlington chapter of Future Farmers of America: a shiny new star. John was able to secure an ideal timeline with the local contractor, whose daughter was spending lots of time with Marybelle, which would allow the new store to be opened by New Year’s. Construction had already begun by the end of that month. Janice began offering a women’s bible study at their house beginning the first Sunday in September, and she also set up a Wednesday Night Craft Night for those same ladies while their kids attended youth groups.
Marybelle had a boyfriend who played football by the second week of October. She’d gone to Homecoming with him and thought he was a complete gentleman, and her parents approved since his father was the pastor of their church. They looked good together walking down the halls, their blonde heads like ripe corn in the fields. Janice, always in a crisp blouse and Levi jeans, made such excellent and high-class hors d’oeuvres that she was promoted to the Sunday Night (pro) Football hostess. The Henderson house was the place to be after games on Friday nights, packed with sweaty footballers and short-skirted cheerleaders happy and tired from the game.
John played golf with the big shots in town: the mayor, the contractor, the owner of the largest cattle ranch in the Eastern Plains. There were several business owners who rotated into their golf game, too. Merle Owens, a man on the backside of fifty, often birdied the front nine but slipped in precision as the game continued, losing to John by two or three strokes. The owner of the feed and supply store, Jim Haskins, had a tendency to land his ball in the sand, but he had an excellent explosion shot. He played almost an entirely different game than the rest of them, and that suited the golfers fine. They really went out to smoke cigars and talk about their money anyway, how no one else in town could ever understand them. When it got too cold to golf, the men still met at the club, but they swapped their game to pool and their cigars for scotch.
Burlington liked the Hendersons. It really did.
When the Dollar General opened on January 3, almost everyone came to buy something. The store was so well stocked that nothing ran out, but most people bought at least three items, one of which was a seasonal Valentine’s Day item. For some it was a wreath, for others it was a set of reusable cups, and for the teens it was the heart-shaped Little Debbie treats in their white cardboard boxes. The Hendersons drove into Denver that weekend to celebrate by going to Seasons 52, one of their favorite restaurants.
The Dollar General was always busy, and so were the Hendersons. They were always smiling and greeting people, ensuring that they knew what people wanted sales on and offering them when they could. When women would come to Sunday Bible Study with their baked goods, they would often tote the goodies in Dollar General yellow plastic bags. At the high school, when students would leave campus for lunch or because they were ditching science or social studies, they would come back with family-sized bags of Hot Cheetos or boxes of Zebra Cakes to share with their friends, purchased at a bargain price from the Henderson’s store. When they decorated for the Winterfest Dance, the student council bought all of their supplies at the Dollar General, and the yellow plastic bags were used to collect trash at the end of the night.
An invasive species causes harm, and in April, the first store went out of business. It was a local grocery owned by Luna Carrol who had already been competing with the town Safeway, but she couldn’t lower her locally sourced milk or egg prices any more, and no one could beat the prices of the Dollar General for snack food. The few locals who cared about locally sourced produce were advised to go directly to the farmers, and Luna turned the lights off in her store for the final time.
A new trend started where middle and high school students would run down the freezer aisle in the Dollar General when all of the motion-sensing lights in the freezers were off, just to turn them on. They’d usually leave with a box of popsicles to split, too.
In July, Marybelle won the honor of being the Kit Carson County Fair Princess, and her nomination coincided with the announcement of another closure. It was a local paper and office supply store that sold cards, printer paper, and other supplies. The store was owned by Merle Owens and his wife, Linda, both of whom loved attending the Hendersons’ football parties. They couldn’t keep people coming in even though their store had existed in Burlington for twenty-five years; their paper was so much more expensive than what you could get at the Dollar General. Merle kept playing golf with John and his big-shot buddies occasionally, but his game slipped and he started losing by more than five strokes on a regular basis. John felt it was a little unfair that his game should suffer, too.
By the end of September, Marybelle got a new boyfriend; her first one had graduated and moved to Sterling to attend the junior college there. Janice added a Thursday Night Cooking Night to her repertoire of hosted events. All of the housewives in Burlington came to those to learn how to make the scrumptious spinach dip that had made Janice so popular, but she kept that recipe a secret and instead taught how to make a delectable pumpkin bread, home-made crackers, and other goodies that the ladies all had to admit were to die for.
A few more stores closed over the course of Marybelle’s junior year, but the Hendersons continued to be more and more prosperous. They were still bringing in income from the store in Limon, too, and when they made the two-and-a-half- hour trek into Denver to shop or dine, they would stop at their store in Limon. A local would usually smile at them uncomfortably, but that person would always buy something. By January, just one year after they’d officially opened the Dollar General in Burlington, a walk down Burlington’s Main Street meant seeing red- and-white “For Sale” signs in a smattering of windows on almost every block. It looked a lot like Limon, actually, with the occasional yellow plastic bag tumbling in the wind as a tumbleweed blows across the empty street. The people who had owned these businesses either found work out of town or packed up and moved, sometimes both, hoping that eventually someone would buy their store.
A tragedy struck Burlington in March, a little over a year since they’d opened the store, and hundreds of people were laid off: the state closed the jail. Townspeople desperately started searching for work, fleeing if necessary, no matter how much they loved their lives, so there were fewer shoppers and less money. The Dollar General had goods for cheap.
One Sunday shortly after the closing of the jail, Janice decided to make an artichoke dip instead of her usual spinach dip for a party she hosted, and that’s when the rumors started. The Hendersons had planned this. They had come in with their Dollar General store and had undercut all of the locals, which meant there were no jobs for when people lost their jobs at the jail. It was the Hendersons’ fault, surely, that they were slowly losing the livelihood of their town.
John, being a kind man, didn’t scold his wife for serving artichoke dip, but he did insist that they serve spinach dip from now on. The mayor mentioned at their golf game that week that he was disappointed, and that John should be sure to let Janice know her place in the community. Even though the Hendersons only served the spinach dip from then on, their parties became less and less popular. When Janice finally taught how to make the famous spinach dip at her Thursday Night Cooking Night, only a handful of the remaining local housewives attended. The contractor, whose wife had attended the cooking session, smiled sadly at John during their next game, and said it was a real shame how folks were acting.
It’s time, John said, and he and Janice sat together with Google Maps pulled up on their desktop computer. They narrowed down three nice towns in eastern Colorado before they asked Marybelle for her opinion.
Marybelle was upset that they were going to have to move (Do I get to stay here for my senior year? she protested. And what about my boyfriend? I love him!), but John and Janice insisted that it was no problem for her to finish school. The Dollar General, after all, was still doing very well, and they were not in a hurry, except that they were worried about her being picked on. They were always worried about appearances, after all. You’ll tell us if you’re being picked on, won’t you, honey? they asked Marybelle, and she agreed that she would.
The three of them decided on Wray. It was a little bit of a risk because it was so small, but the Hendersons thought the town was just too cute to resist. They liked how there were buttes and low hills carved by past rivers, how they weren’t just completely surrounded by corn.
Though the summer was more prosperous than ever for the store, and the middle and high school students still came in to run down the freezer aisle, the Hendersons didn’t have very many people at their mid-summer bash (only about fifty-five when they’d made food for eighty), and Marybelle wasn’t chosen to be county fair royalty.
In the fall, too, Marybelle was not chosen for the lead in the play, even though she had been promised she was a shoe-in the spring before. Her boyfriend broke up with her because he said that Goodland—thirty-two miles to the east—was just too far away for them to continue dating while he started college at the junior college there, but she knew that was a lie. Marybelle cried for days, and no one asked her to Homecoming. She wasn’t even an option for the Homecoming court, even though she had been the Prom princess the preceding May.
Though she wasn’t being picked on, exactly, it was obvious that the Hendersons’ welcome—and almost unbelievable popularity—had come to an end.
If one were to study the town economics, the slighting of the Hendersons might seem odd. Maybe the locals hadn’t paid attention to who owned the Dollar General, or maybe they had simply forgotten for the convenience of cheap milk and Hot Cheetos. If they really wanted to ruin the Hendersons, they would have withheld patronage from the actual root of their problem—the real invader. The Dollar General continued to thrive, even though the popularity of the Hendersons did not.
There was a large sale to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the store. Everything from socks to soda was discounted by twenty percent. The people of Burlington flooded in, the yellow plastic bags flooded out.
John and Janice consoled their daughter through her final year of high school. They even took her on a trip for her February birthday to Hawai’i, assuring her that she was going to make more friends in her future. She had so much going for her, didn’t she see that? It was undeniable that she was the best student in her class, so the teachers were forced to allow her to speak at graduation in May. Marybelle, who was kind like her father, talked of all the good things and how wonderful the community was and how great they had all been for embracing a stranger.
After Marybelle’s graduation, Janice turned her attention to Wray. She chose a house on 5th Street near the Catholic church, ensuring centrality for entertaining, even though it was more space than they needed with Marybelle attending the University of Colorado in Boulder in the fall to double major in business and marketing. They came out a little ahead financially in the purchase of their new home, so they bought Marybelle a new car so she could make it back to Wray when she wanted to from Boulder, only three hours away.
That July they all packed up, silently boycotting the county fair, and Janice worked with the Realtor to stage the house on Senter Avenue while John got everything set up with a contractor. They would be able to open even sooner this time, by mid-November, which excited them both.
After they took Marybelle to college in early August and got her settled, John and Janice oversaw the movers and took the fifty-five mile drive up Highway 385 through the corn fields and spacious, untamed ranchland to Wray. Janice set up her weekly bible study and Wednesday Night Craft Night before their Burlington house even sold. The people of Burlington continued to frequent the Dollar General, but they didn’t miss the Hendersons at all.
Andréa Rivard holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her background is in English Education, and she tutors English online, mostly creative writing. She’s currently working on her first novel. Her fiction has been published or is upcoming in the Gateway Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.