The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close
He fit the key in the lock and turned it. The padlock opened with a small flat click and hung in his hand, and he looked at it as though he had never seen it before, the brass, the sticker, the mark of the factory on the hasp. Then he put it in his coat pocket and pushed open the nursery door, and the smell of cardboard and canned goods came out into the hall.
“The deacons,” he said. “I need to say it to the three of them. Tonight, if they’d meet.”
“Delbert called me this morning,” I said. “He asked if I’d come to his kitchen at seven tonight. I did not ask what he wanted.”
“Then he’s ahead of me,” said Wally.
There were five of us at Delbert Wheeler’s kitchen table that evening, which is as small a church meeting as I have ever been to. Delbert, Tom Ashby, Velma Tate, Wally, and me. Opal Wheeler set out a plate of lemon bars and went into the living room and turned the television on loud.
Wally spoke first. He read from his ledger, and he did not look up from it. He told them the money was designated. He told them he had not taken it to the floor because he knew what the floor would say. He told them about the $2,300 deposit on the walk-in cooler, which the company would not return, and that a vote of three was not a vote of the church, and that he had known the difference for fourteen years.
“I told myself it was the roof,” he said. “It is the roof. That doesn’t make it the right way to fix it.”
Nobody spoke.
Tom Ashby is a quiet farmer with a cough who says about eleven words a year. “I signed it,” he said. “I never went down the stairs. Not once. In nine years.”
“Neither did I,” said Delbert. “I voted yes on a piece of paper.” He put both his big hands on the oilcloth. “I took it that the people who came to that room were strangers. Teddy Halvorsen sat across from me yesterday and ate my wife’s potatoes. He used to work with my nephew. Strangers.” He shook his head slowly. “What are we, Wally?”
“Careless,” Wally said.
“I’d say so,” said Delbert.
Velma Tate had her pencil in her hand. She taught high school bookkeeping for twenty years before she took the teller window at the bank, and she was the only person in the room who had not yet said a word.
“I move that we rescind the vote of the twenty-fifth of September,” she said. “That the pantry fund be put back into its own account, and the room returned to the use it was dedicated for. And that no designated gift be moved without the vote of the membership.”
“Second,” said Tom.
It was 3 to 0 again, the opposite way, and Velma wrote it in the minutes in ink.
Wally asked to say one more thing. He said he would write a personal check for the $2,300 in the morning, so the pantry fund was whole to the dollar, and that he would not stand for treasurer again. He thought someone else ought to count after him this year, with the books open. Velma said she would be glad to.
Delbert pushed the lemon bars toward him. “Eat something,” he said. “You’ve lost weight.”
Wally took one. That was all that happened. I drove home in the dark and sat in my own driveway for ten minutes with the engine off.