The Art Room in the Old Depot

Lyle got up and carried the clipboard to the table himself.

And Curt Maas read the names. All of them. Sixty-one, from the first Saturday, in the order they had come through the door. He read the ones in Lyle’s block capitals and the ones in crooked pencil. He read them slowly, the way they read the names at the cemetery on Memorial Day, and when he got to number nine he said “Darius” and went right on, and his voice held.

You could hear mothers in that room. You could hear a few fathers.

When he finished he took his glasses off.

“That’s what was under the line,” he said. “I didn’t know that in April. I should have, and I didn’t. I saw a number, because numbers are what they hand me.” He turned the bowl a quarter turn with one finger. “My grandson made this. He worked on it three weeks. On the bottom it says, For Grandpa, so you have something from me at work. He did that in a train station, on a Saturday, with a teacher we weren’t paying, in a building she rents out of her own pocket.”

He looked at me then, straight on.

“Anne, I told you that you were welcome to volunteer. I’ve thought about that sentence a good deal. I’d like to take it back, if you’ll let me. I’m sorry for it.”

I could not have made a speech if I had wanted to. I nodded. Tom’s hand was on my back.

“Now. The kids are still gone,” Curt said to the room. “I’m not going to tell you different. The money’s as short tonight as it was in the spring. So I asked the business manager to go through the general fund with me line by line. There’s thirty-four thousand five hundred dollars in the maintenance line to resurface the parking lot behind the district office. Our lot. Where we park for these meetings.” There was a little laughter. “She has checked it twice. It’s general fund money, the same pot as salaries, and we can move it. That lot has had potholes for six years. I move that we go on driving around them, and that we restore line fourteen, effective with the second quarter.”

Sandy seconded it before he had quite finished.

It was five to nothing. It took less time than it had taken in April.

People clapped then, and stood up, and I did not know where to look, so I looked at Lyle. He was sitting very straight with his hands on his knees, where the clipboard had been.

Afterward Curt found me by the trophy case. The crowd was thinning out. He had the bowl in his hand. He was not going to leave it in a library.

“You never came to a meeting,” he said. “All summer. I kept waiting for you to come in here and let me have it. I had what I was going to say back all worked out.”

“I didn’t have anything to say that would’ve helped a child, Curt.”

“No.” He turned his cap around in his other hand. “You just went and did it. I’ll tell you, that’s a harder thing to sit across from than a speech.”

“You had to cut something. I knew that. I’ve known you a long time.”

“I didn’t have to say what I said.”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t. But you said the other thing tonight, in front of everybody, and I don’t know many men who would. So we’re square.”