The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

The last Saturday

The rule has always been two counters. Two women at the card table in the back office, the door shut, the cash in rubber-banded stacks by denomination, both of us writing our totals on separate slips of paper before we compare. Bernice and me, usually. Fourteen years, and we have matched to the dollar every single time but once.

That Saturday Bernice was not there. Her husband Dwayne was at Deaconess in Evansville having his gallbladder taken out. She had called me at five in the morning to say she would not make it, and I told her not to think about it, I would handle everything, and I meant it.

Dottie went home at one because her legs were done, and Pat had her grandbaby. So at a quarter to eleven I was alone in the back office, tired, my left eye still tender from the cataract surgery the Tuesday before, the doctor’s orders still good for no night driving, and I counted the money alone, and I counted it twice.

The money came to two thousand three hundred eighty-six dollars even. I wrote it in pencil on the tally sheet and I can still see the column. Fifties, two. Twenties, fifty-six. Tens, forty-six. Fives, sixty-two. Ones, three hundred eighty-six, and a roll of quarters somebody’s grandson had donated from his piggy bank.

I filled out the deposit slip by hand, as always. “Elk Creek Fire Auxiliary.” The account number, which I could write in my sleep. The total, with the sevens crossed. Bernice keeps the auxiliary’s own zipper bag in her purse, and her purse was in Evansville, so I took one of the department’s spares off the shelf by the office door. It never crossed my mind that the tag on it mattered. In fourteen years I had never once been the one to carry the money to the bank. I folded the slip around the cash, put both in the bag, zipped it, and sat there a minute with it in my lap, trying to decide what to do with it.

I couldn’t take it home, because Walt always said never take the cash home, and I couldn’t drive it myself. Tyler Beck was in the bay, putting the folding tables on the rack.

If you grew up in a town like ours you know a boy like Tyler. Nineteen years old, big feet, a buzz cut his mother gave him in the kitchen, polite to a fault. He had been a junior firefighter since he was sixteen, and he was leaving at five the next morning for Army basic training.

“Tyler, honey,” I said. “I hate to ask.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Would you run this by the night drop at Pigeon Creek on your way home? It’s the money from today. It has to go in tonight.”

“Yes ma’am. I go right by it.” He took the bag from me the way you would take a baby from a stranger. He tucked it inside his jacket and zipped the jacket up over it, and he said, “I won’t let go of it, Miss Glenda.”

I said, “Thank you, honey. And good luck. You make us proud.”

He grinned. He had a gap between his front teeth. That was the last I saw of him that fall.

I went home. I wrote the total in the ledger at my kitchen table, with the date, and I put the tally sheet in the folder, and I went to bed. The next morning I was in church by nine, and I asked Sherry Beck how her boy was doing, and she squeezed my hand in the narthex and said he had packed and unpacked his duffel three times.

I did not think about the money again for four days.