The Bill Our Town Paid In Secret
Asking Around
I work the morning shift at the co-op elevator, greasing bearings and walking the catwalks checking belts, the kind of work where men talk to each other across a noisy room without really looking up. That Wednesday I asked, loud enough for the whole crew to hear over the compressor, whether anybody knew anything about Nora’s hospital bill getting paid off.
Russ Hutto, who’s worked that elevator longer than I’ve been alive, looked at his boots. Cort Varney looked at the head pulley bearing he was greasing like it had become the single most interesting bearing in Kansas. Nobody said a word, which in a room full of men who will talk your ear off about the weather for twenty minutes is its own kind of answer.
“Y’all know something,” I said.
“We don’t know anything, Cody,” Russ said, which was the most obviously untrue sentence I had heard in a week that already had some strong competition.
I tried church next. Pastor Delmar Figg has known me since I was in the nursery at Trinity Community, and pastors are supposed to be bad liars, it’s practically in the job description, so I figured he’d crack first. I caught him after Wednesday night prayer meeting, folding chairs.
“Pastor Delmar. I need to ask you something and I need you to just tell me straight.”
“I generally try to,” he said, which was not a yes.
“Our hospital bill. Thirty eight thousand dollars. It’s gone. Paid off, as of Monday. Nobody will tell me who.”
He set a chair down slower than a chair needs to be set down. “There might have been a special collection taken up a while back,” he said. “For a family in need. I couldn’t tell you exactly which family, or exactly how much, because the deacons handle the designated fund, not me, and they don’t always loop me in on the particulars.”
“Pastor Delmar.”
“Cody, I am telling you the truth. I was not in the room for every part of this. What I can tell you is that this congregation loves your family, and whatever happened here, it happened because people wanted it to, and nobody is going to feel right about being named for it. You might ought to just let that be the answer.”
I almost could have let that be the answer, except I am not built that way, and neither is Amber, who had already started her own investigation on the women’s side of this, texting her sister and two friends from the young mothers group, getting the same wall of warm, loving, absolutely useless non-answers I was getting from the men.