The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

Fourteen years of pencil

I should tell you who I am, because it matters to how this felt.

My name is Glenda Vohs. I am sixty-eight years old and I have lived my whole life within eleven miles of Boonville, Indiana, which is the Warrick County seat and has a courthouse square, a Dairy Dream, and more churches than it needs. I was a bookkeeper at the Hoosier Grain elevator for twenty-nine years. I retired the spring before my husband did, and then he did not get to enjoy his, because Walt had a heart attack in the garage while he was changing the oil in the church van, three years ago this March.

Walt was a volunteer firefighter for thirty-one years, nine of them as assistant chief for Elk Creek Township. That is how I came to the auxiliary. The fire department is the men and women who run into the building. The auxiliary is the people who make sure they have something to run in with. Boots, hose, a thermal camera that costs more than my first house. The county gives the department just enough for the diesel. Everything else comes out of pancakes.

I took over the books in my first year, because Walt’s mother had done it on the back of paper placemats for twenty years and someone needed to stop that. I bought a green cloth ledger at the Hoosier Office Supply on the square, the old kind with the red corners, and I have kept every breakfast, every chili supper, every raffle quilt and every spaghetti dinner in it ever since. In pencil. I cross my sevens the way Mr. Dubois taught us in bookkeeping class at Boonville High in 1976, and I have never in my life left a column without footing it.

Once, in 2016, the books were off by nineteen cents. I drove back to the station at nine at night and went through the cash box twice, and I found a dime and a nickel and four pennies that had fallen into the lining. Bernice teased me about it for a year. She still brings it up at Christmas.

The pancake breakfast is the big one. Second Saturday of October, the start of Fire Prevention Week, six to eleven in the apparatus bay with the trucks pulled out on the apron. Eight dollars a plate, four for kids, and Shirley Dorsett’s sorghum syrup goes out in the old glass pitchers and comes back empty. Last year we cleared eighteen hundred dollars. This year, with the weather good and the football game in town, we served three hundred and twelve plates, and I had never seen the bay so full.