The Bill Our Town Paid In Secret
The Notebook
“This isn’t mine to just hand you,” he said, setting it on the counter between us, his big hand still flat on top of it. “A lot of these folks gave with the clear understanding they’d never be named. I need you to hear that before you look.”
“I hear it.”
“I mean it, Cody. Some of these names, if you go thank them by name, you’ll embarrass them worse than if you’d never found out at all. Some people around here would rather give until it costs them something and never be known for it than be known for it and have it cost them nothing.”
I nodded, and he slid his hand off the cover, and I opened it.
It was two months of names and numbers, written in at least four different handwritings, because apparently more than one person had kept this book at different points. The fish fry total was there first, thirty one hundred dollars with the silent auction added in, which about floored me on its own, for one Friday night supper in a town of nineteen hundred people.
Then the smaller gifts, over weeks. Twenty dollars, written next to a date, and then another twenty dollars three Fridays later, and another, from somebody Stan told me was Verna Oakes, who is eighty one years old, lives alone on the edge of town on her late husband’s social security, and had apparently been bringing a twenty dollar bill into the diner every single Friday for two months and asking Stan to add it to whatever he was collecting for “that little Reichert girl.”
A boy’s name I recognized, Brody Medders, fifteen years old, forty five dollars next to it, and a note in Stan’s handwriting: lawn money, all of it, three weeks running.
Names from the church I half knew, fifty here, a hundred there, a woman from the beauty shop who’d apparently done a cut-a-thon one Saturday and donated every dollar of it.
And then, near the bottom of the second page, a number that stopped my finger cold on the paper.
Six thousand dollars.
Not six hundred. Six thousand. Written next to a name I knew, but not well. Russell and Connie Hjelm.