The Cookie Fund on Every Check

The long year

I saw Lily at Christmas. Brian and Ashley had me over for dinner on Christmas Eve, and it was pleasant in the way a waiting room is pleasant.

Ashley watched the dessert table like a lifeguard. I brought a relish tray. I did not bring cookies. I did not bring up the list.

Lily climbed into my lap after supper and showed me a book about a bear who couldn’t sleep. I read it four times. She fell asleep against me in the middle of the fifth.

“She misses her Thursdays,” Brian said quietly, in the kitchen, while Ashley put her to bed.

“So do I.”

“I’m going to tell her, Mom. After the holidays. When work slows down.”

“Brian.”

“I know.”

Work did not slow down. It never does for a seed salesman. Winter is meetings and orders. Spring is planting, when a farmer will call you at five in the morning because his planter is plugging. Summer is scouting. Fall is harvest and next year’s orders.

I saw Lily at Easter, in her yellow dress, hunting eggs in their new-sod backyard. I saw her for her third birthday in April, in their finished basement, where I gave her a book and a stuffed rabbit and kept my hands at my sides at the cake table.

March, cookie fund. April. May. June. July. August. September.

My friend Kim from church asked me once what I would do if Ashley never found out.

“Keep paying,” I said.

“Forever?”

“Until Lily goes to kindergarten. Then it’s free, isn’t it? The Lord has his own way of ending things.”

Ron used to have a saying. He farmed with his dad until the farm crisis took it, and then he drove a feed truck for the co-op for twenty-five years, and he did not say much, but what he said stuck.

“Pay what you owe,” he used to say, “and let the Lord do the talking.”

I did not exactly owe this. But I kept paying, and I let Him do the talking, and for eleven months He didn’t say a word.

The twelfth check

On the first Thursday of this October, I drove to Little Lambs with the twelfth check since the list in an envelope on the passenger seat, and a white bakery bag of kolaches in my lap at the stoplight because I didn’t want them to slide.

I went down the stairs. The fluorescent lights hummed. There were new drawings on the cinder block wall, orange and brown leaves, and somebody’s leaf had a face.

Through the glass in the classroom door I could see the three-year-olds on the rug for circle time. I looked for Lily. She was in the second row, cross-legged, with her hair in two pigtails that were not even. Brian had done them. I could tell.

I set the bakery bag on the counter. Mrs. Vander Wal came out of her little office with a clipboard against her chest.

I handed her the envelope. This time she opened it. She took out the check and looked at the memo line, the way she must have every month, and then she looked at me for a long moment over her glasses.

“Would you stay a minute, Sharon?” she said.

“Of course.”

She did not explain. She went back into her office. I heard a file drawer open.

Then I heard footsteps on the stairs, quick ones, and Ashley came down into the lobby in her white pharmacy coat with her name stitched on the pocket, keys in her hand. It was two thirty. Early for pickup.

She saw me and stopped on the bottom step.

“What are you doing here?” she said. Not loud. Ashley is never loud. She is careful. Every word measured out like a prescription.

“Dropping something off,” I said.

She turned to the counter as Mrs. Vander Wal came back out with a manila folder.

“She can’t take Lily,” Ashley said. “She’s on the list. You have the list.”

“I do,” Mrs. Vander Wal said. “She isn’t here for Lily. Ashley, would you come here a moment? There’s something on your account I think you should see.”