The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

Under our name

I sat in that fellowship hall and I said, quite clearly, “I would like someone to ask the bank to look for the bag.”

“I did that, Glenda,” Bernice said. “I called Rhonda at Pigeon Creek this afternoon. Rhonda Teague, the branch manager. She said the night drop was clean. No deposit came in under our name.”

Under our name.

I turned that over, and I want to be fair to everyone at that table, because I have tried to be fair to them ever since. They were frightened. Eight months before, the school boosters had found out their treasurer had been skimming for six years, a hundred and fifty dollars at a time. Everybody in the county knew the woman. She had taught Sunday school. Every group in Warrick County that held a cash box had been looking sideways at itself ever since.

But I also knew the shape of what she had said, because I have spent my life in columns. Rhonda had looked under our name. Nobody had looked for twenty-three hundred eighty-six dollars. Nobody had asked the bank to look at everything that came through the night drop on Saturday, for any account, and see what was there. They had looked for a person, and when the person was not there they had decided the problem was another person.

I did not say that. I want to tell you I did, but I did not. I said, “Would you ask Rhonda to look at the whole night drop for Saturday?”

Bernice said, “I’ll ask her.” The way you say it when you are not going to.

Then she folded her hands again and said the thing I have not forgotten.

“Glenda, nobody here is saying anyone did anything. I want that to be clear. But as the board, I think for everyone’s protection, and yours most of all, it might be best if I held the cash box and the ledger until this is sorted out. Just so no one can say anything. Would that be all right?”

I looked at the ledger in front of me. It was open to the page for the breakfast. Fourteen years of my handwriting were in that book.

I closed it. I picked it up. I held it for a second against my coat, and I want to be honest, I did not want to let go. Then I slid it down the table to her, and the little brass key to the cash box with it, which I carry on the same ring as my house key and have since Walt gave it to me.

“Nobody is saying anything,” I said.

“Thank you, Glenda,” Bernice said. “I’m sure it’s a mix-up.”

I drove home with the window down, even though it was forty degrees, because I could not seem to get enough air.

The quiet

Nothing happened. That is the part I have trouble explaining to people.

Nobody accused me. Nobody said the word. The sheriff was not called. No one posted anything on the community page. If you had asked any woman in that auxiliary, she would have told you with a clear conscience that she had said nothing against me, and it would have been true.

But the casseroles stopped.

It sounds petty. I did not need the casseroles. But after Walt died, a rotation began without anyone announcing it. Someone left a dish on my porch every Monday, Pat’s meatloaf, Carol Ann’s chicken and noodles, and it was never discussed. The week after the meeting, the porch was bare.

On Sunday I went to church and stood in the narthex like I always do, and the women who had hugged me every Sunday for three years touched my elbow instead, and smiled with their mouths closed, and went to find someone else.

My daughter Lisa called me from Evansville that weekend. She is forty-four and a nurse and does not waste words. “Mom, a girl I went to school with said something about the fire auxiliary and you. What’s going on?”

“Nothing is going on.”

“She said somebody saw a roofing truck at your house in September.”