The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find
Bernice Rademacher waited until I had set my ledger on the table and hung my coat on the back of the folding chair before she asked.
That was the first thing I noticed. In fourteen years she had never once let me get my coat off before she asked me something. Usually it was “Glenda, do you have the syrup count?” before I got the door shut.
This time she folded her hands on the table and let the whole fellowship hall go quiet around her. Liberty Ridge United Methodist has a fellowship hall with a drop ceiling and a pass-through window to the kitchen, and on a Wednesday night in October the radiators knock like somebody is trying to get out. I could hear every one of them.
“Glenda,” she said. “Before we start, I need to ask you something, and I want you to know I’m asking as your friend.”
Six women sat at those tables. Dottie Hargis, who is eighty-three and has been in the Elk Creek Fire Auxiliary since the year they bought the first pumper. Pat Wimsatt, our vice president, whom I once drove to Evansville for chemo eleven Tuesdays in a row. Carol Ann, Betty, the two Schenk sisters. I knew every one of their coffee orders.
Not one of them was looking at me. They were looking at the table, at their hands, at the plate of lemon bars somebody had brought. When a room full of people you love will not look at you, you do not need to be told the question is bad.
“The pancake breakfast money didn’t go into our account,” Bernice said. “I looked online this morning. Nothing from the eleventh. Not a dime. It should have been right around twenty-three hundred dollars.”
“Twenty-three hundred eighty-six,” I said. “And no cents.”
I said it before I thought, because that is how my mind works. It was my number. I had counted it.
“Where is it, Glenda?”
I would like to tell you I got angry. What came out of me was small and dry and sounded like somebody else’s mother.
“I gave it to Tyler Beck on Saturday night,” I said. “In the zipper bag. He said he was going right past the bank and he would put it in the night drop.”
Nobody said anything.
“Tyler left for Fort Jackson on Sunday morning,” Bernice said gently. “Army basic. Weldon says they don’t get their phones for a good while. Not till they’ve settled in.”
“Then somebody should write him a letter.”
“Glenda.” That was Dottie, and she said it the way you say a name to a child who has been standing too close to the stove. “Tyler Beck wouldn’t take a dime out of a collection plate. You know that. We all know that.”
And there it was. Nobody had said what it left. Nobody had to. The boy was a saint, the boy was gone, the bank had nothing, and there was one other person in the county who had touched that bag, and she was sitting at the head of the table in her good cardigan with a green cloth ledger in front of her.