The Brooch That Named The Thief
What Pruett Learned
Word got around Pruett the way word always does here, not because I told everybody, but because a town this size can’t hold a secret that size for long, especially once Mr. Halloran mentioned it to the men who gather at his shop most mornings, and once the deacon’s wife who’d first suggested Mrs. Odell step down from Sunday school heard the whole thing from three different directions in one week.
Edwin lost his seat on the co-op board within the month, quietly, the way these things happen out here, nobody voting him out directly, just a suggestion that he sit this term out, which everybody understood for what it was. He stopped going to the same coffee counter on the square where he’d sat every morning for a decade, because the silence that greeted him there said more than any of us could have.
He also stepped down, on his own, from the color guard he’d stood with every Memorial Day at the VFW hall out on Route 9, telling the post commander only that he needed a season away, without explaining why. I think that one cost him more than the co-op seat did. Edwin had marched in that hall’s parade every year since he came back from his own hitch in the service, and I know, because he told me himself, that standing under that flag felt different to him after Sunday supper than it had the year before.
He drove out to see Mrs. Odell himself, twice, without me asking him to. The second time, he brought an envelope with a figure in it that I happen to know came close to what she estimated, as best she could reconstruct it, she’d lost in wages and rent and opportunity over those nineteen years, a number well past fifteen thousand dollars by her own rough accounting. She didn’t ask him for it. He brought it anyway, which I’ll grant him, even now.
The brooch itself sits with Mrs. Odell now. Edwin gave it to her outright, no conditions, the same week he made his second drive out to see her. I think giving it up cost him something he badly needed to lose.
She wore it to church the first Sunday she came back to Pruett for a visit, pinned under her collarbone the way my mother used to wear it. Half the congregation went quiet when they saw it, and I watched two or three women who’d looked away from her in the grocery aisle all those years ago walk straight up afterward to say they were sorry, plainly, the way it should have been said the first time.