The Envelope Under the Casserole Dish

Evelyn looked at that circled number a long time. Then she looked up at me, and I saw something in her face I had never once seen in twenty-six years. She looked lost.

“I had it,” she said, very quietly. “You gave it to me. It says so right here. You gave it to me.”

“I did,” I said.

“Then where did it go?” Her voice cracked on the last word. “Julie, where did I put it? I don’t know where I put it.”

And then she started to cry. Not the way you cry at a funeral.

The way a child cries when she’s lost in a store and has just figured out nobody is coming around the next aisle.

That was when Pastor Ann came down the stairs. She told me later she heard it from the landing and took the rest of the steps faster than her knees appreciated.

Pastor Ann is in her sixties, a farm kid from Barron County who came to us eleven years ago.

She doesn’t make speeches. She took one look at the table and pulled a folding chair right up beside Evelyn.

She didn’t ask anybody what happened. She sat down, took Evelyn’s hand in both of hers, and said, “Evelyn. It’s Ann. You’re all right. Take your time.”

Evelyn held onto her like a railing. For a while she couldn’t say anything at all. Pastor Ann just waited, and the rest of us waited with her.

Then Evelyn said, “I hid my egg money.”

Pastor Ann nodded like this was the most ordinary thing in the world. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me about the egg money.”

“From the chickens,” Evelyn said. “Years and years of it. Walt never knew how much. And whatever Julie brought me, I put it in with the egg money. So it would be safe.”

She pressed her hand flat on her chest. “And now I can’t find it.”

“Where did you used to keep it?” Pastor Ann asked.

“I don’t know.” Evelyn shook her head and the tears came again.

“I moved it. I moved it so nobody would take it, and I don’t know where. I’ve looked and looked. I looked every night.”

She turned to me then. Her eyes were red and her mouth was trembling. “I thought somebody took it. And you’re the only one who comes. So I thought it had to be you.”

“I know,” I said. My throat was so tight it hurt.

“I’m forgetting things,” she said, and she said it to the whole table, to the women she’d known since grade school.

“I’m forgetting things, and I didn’t want anybody to know. I thought if I said somebody stole it, then it wasn’t me.”

That sentence is the one I will remember for the rest of my life. I thought if I said somebody stole it, then it wasn’t me.

A seventy-eight-year-old woman would rather believe her daughter-in-law was a thief than believe her own mind was slipping.

I understood it. That’s the thing. Sitting there in that church basement, I understood it completely, and every ounce of hurt I’d carried for six days just went out of me like water out of a sink.

Marlene was the first one to speak up. She is not a soft woman. She ran the school lunch program for thirty years and she does not suffer foolishness. She looked right at me.