The clinic had run for nine years out of a church basement, every Saturday from February through April, staffed by me and four retired colleagues and a rotating cast of student volunteers.
We served whoever walked in, mostly seniors and single parents and day laborers, and we never charged a cent.
The coordinator, a tireless woman who had run the sign-in table since the beginning, called me the week the video peaked and said she had a problem she had never had before.
“We have too many volunteers,” she said, and I laughed, because in nine years we had never once had enough.
The florist from Kristin’s client list showed up first, with her own laptop and a box of pastries, and she said she wanted to learn to do intake.
A retired bank teller came next, then a college sophomore studying accounting, then a woman who had seen the video and said she wanted to stand next to me, not across from me.
By the third Saturday, we had twenty-two volunteers, and the church basement, which had always felt spacious, felt like a beehive.
We ran out of folding tables and borrowed six from the fellowship hall, and we ran out of extension cords and bought more with the donation jar money.
The donation jar, which had never held more than forty dollars, held two hundred by noon, and someone had taped a note to it that said “for the lady in the video.”
I did not know whether to laugh or cry, so I did neither, and I trained the new volunteers on intake forms instead.
The florist turned out to have a gift for calming nervous clients, and the sophomore turned out to be fast with the software, and the bank teller caught an error on a return that would have cost a widow her refund.
We served forty-one families that Saturday, which was a record, and the coordinator wrote the number on the whiteboard in big red marker.
The next week, a local television reporter called and asked if she could film a segment, and I said yes before the coordinator could say no.
The reporter came on a Saturday with a cameraman, and she interviewed me at the intake table with the basement’s fluorescent lights humming overhead.
She asked about the video, and I told her the clinic was the story, not the luncheon, and she nodded like she understood.
The segment aired on the six o’clock news that Friday, and it ran for three minutes, which is an eternity in local news.
It showed the basement, the volunteers, the whiteboard with the red number, and it showed me helping an old man with his Social Security worksheet.
It did not show the luncheon, and it did not show Kristin, and it did not show the slap.
It showed what came after, which was the part I cared about.
The phone at the church started ringing on Saturday morning, before we had even unlocked the basement door.
The coordinator counted the voicemails at noon, and there were thirty-one, and every one of them was someone asking to volunteer.
A retired IRS agent offered his Saturdays.
Two more accounting students offered their spring break.
A woman who owned a payroll company offered to donate ten laptops, and she delivered them herself on Sunday in a borrowed van.
The whiteboard number from the week before looked small suddenly, and the coordinator bought a bigger whiteboard.
We scheduled a second clinic day, on Wednesday evenings, because the basement was booked on the other Saturdays, and the volunteers filled every slot.
The florist took over the Wednesday intake table like she had been born to it, and she started bringing her teenage daughter to help with filing.
The sophomore recruited three classmates, and the bank teller recruited her entire retired colleagues’ lunch group.
I sat at my usual table, the one by the water heater, and I watched the basement fill with people who had come because of a video of a slap.
It was the strangest arithmetic of my life, and I did the math the way I have always done it, carefully and without flinching.
One torn red gown had become forty-one families, and forty-one families were about to become something much larger.
The Wednesday evening clinic opened the following week, and we served thirty-three families on the first night, most of them workers who could never come on a Saturday.
A night-shift nurse brought her pay stubs in a grocery bag, and the sophomore found her a credit she had missed for three years running.
A grandfather who raised two grandkids on a fixed income left with a refund that made him sit down and put his head in his hands.
