The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted

What Bonnie Did Next

Here is what happened in the ninety seconds after that, and I will give it to you as fairly as I can, because I did not enjoy it.

The pastor, a gentle man with a soft voice, rose from his chair at table five and walked toward us with the kind of smile you wear when you have been carrying an awkward question for days. He took Bonnie’s hand.

“Bonnie,” he said, “I wanted to tell you in person. We received a gift this week for the roof. It arrived by mail. It was anonymous, and it covers the entire repair.” He looked at her, kindly and puzzled. “I wondered, though. You told the committee on Wednesday that Joanne’s salary was going to pay for it. I was going to ask Joanne how she’d like us to acknowledge her. And now I am a little confused about whose gift it is.”

Every head at the nearby tables turned.

Bonnie opened her mouth. For the first time in all the years I would know her, nothing came out of it.

“I did not make any such pledge in my name, Pastor,” I said gently. “Bonnie may have spoken in haste. But the roof is covered, and I am glad of it.”

The pastor looked from me to Bonnie, and I saw him understand the entire shape of the thing: the deposit form, the sixty dollars, the story about management, the promise to the committee of money that was never hers to promise. He did not say a word. He simply let go of her hand.

“Mama,” Lyle said.

Bonnie looked at her son.

He was standing very straight, the way he stands at the counter when a customer has been wrong for a long time and has to be told, kindly, which way the fitting turns.

“Mama, I want my paycheck back,” he said. “All fourteen years of them.”

“Lyle,” said Bonnie, “not here.”

“You said we keep the books at home,” he said. “This isn’t home. This is where everybody who works with me is standing. I’d like you to say it out loud. How much is in the family account?”

“That is private.”

“How much?”

Dwight put his glasses on the table. “Bonnie,” he said, in a voice I had never heard from him, a voice like a gate closing. “Answer the boy.”

She did not answer. She picked up her purse, a navy leather one, and held it in her lap like a shield.

“Sixty-one thousand dollars,” Dwight said slowly, looking at his wife. “I know, because I check the statement when you’re at the beauty shop. I never said anything. Fourteen years I never said anything.” He looked down at his hands. “I should have. That’s mine.”

“It was for the family,” Bonnie said, and her voice shook.

“It was Lyle’s,” said Dwight.

Raymond stared at his plate. Sherry was crying openly now, not loud, just steady, one hand pressed against her mouth. I reached across the table and took her other hand, and she squeezed it with a force that startled me.

“I get sixty dollars a week,” she said, to no one in particular, to the whole table, the whole hall. “I would like to stop that.”

“Sherry,” said Raymond.

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m so tired, Ray.”

Bonnie rose. She was shaking. She said to Lyle, in a small voice I had never heard from her, “I was only trying to keep you safe.”

“I know you were,” Lyle said. “That’s what makes it hard.”

She left through the side door, and Dwight followed her, slowly, one hand on the back of her chair as he passed it.