The Envelope Under the Casserole Dish
That was the one that kept me up. Not the purse on her lap, not the counting. Two women I’d made funeral bars beside, moving three rows back without a word.
The thing nobody tells you about being accused is how lonely it is.
You do your same chores in your same kitchen, and the whole time you feel like you are standing in a window with the light on.
After church I went home and made Evelyn’s Sunday dinner anyway. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans with a little bacon.
I carried it across the road and set it down and she said, “Thank you,” to the plate.
It was the first thing she’d said to me in four days. I held onto it all the way home like a mitten I’d found in the snow.
I have to tell you about Evelyn before all this, so you understand why it cut the way it did. When I married Mike, I was twenty-one and scared of her.
She was a big, capable farm wife who could butcher a chicken in the time it took me to find an apron.
The first Thanksgiving I brought a pumpkin pie with a cracked top. Her sister-in-law made a remark about it.
Evelyn cut herself the biggest piece on the plate, ate every bite in front of everybody, and said, “Best crust I’ve had in years.”
It was not the best crust she’d had in years. It was a store crust. But she said it in front of the whole family, and nobody made a remark about my pies again.
She taught me to can tomatoes. She sat with me in the hospital when our son was born and Mike was stuck in a snowstorm in North Dakota.
She held my hand through the worst of it and told me stories about Walt to keep my mind off the pain.
And two Christmases ago, the first one after Walt, she gave me her mother’s rolling pin.
Maple, worn smooth in the middle, with one handle a little darker than the other from a hundred years of hands.
She put it in my lap at her kitchen table and said, “This goes to my girl.” That’s what she called me sometimes. Her girl. She’d never had a daughter.
So when Donna told me what Evelyn had said at the Bible study, it wasn’t the stealing that hurt.
It was that the woman who called me her girl had looked around a table at faces she trusted and said that about me.
Monday night I took the shoebox down off the dryer and carried it to the kitchen table. I made a pot of decaf.
I got out the adding machine I use for the church books, the old one with the paper roll.
I took the rubber bands off one month at a time. February, two years ago, when she first handed me the card.
March. April. I flattened every receipt with the side of my hand and ran the total.
There were 104 weeks of them. Some weeks had two receipts, when she ran out of milk midweek or needed something from the pharmacy.
The adding machine chattered and the paper curled down onto the floor.
Groceries, prescriptions, birdseed, the occasional box of chocolate-covered cherries she liked at Christmas. Seven thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars over two years. About seventy-one dollars a week.