The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

I laughed. It was not funny, but it was so exactly what a small town does that I laughed until I had to sit on the stairs.

Because it was true. I had put a new roof on the house in September, a sixty-one-hundred-dollar roof from Rudolph and Sons, after a hailstorm took half the shingles in August. I paid for it out of the last of Walt’s life insurance, in a check, and the check was in my account, and anyone who had asked me would have seen the cancelled thing in about thirty seconds. Nobody asked. They just put one fact beside another and let the two of them stand there touching.

“Mom, you need to say something. You need to go to the next meeting and demand they look at the bank.”

“I’m not going to demand anything.”

“Why not?”

I thought about that. The honest answer was that it would not have made any difference, and the other honest answer was Walt.

Walt was the quietest man I ever knew. Once, when we were first married, somebody in his family spread a story about me that wasn’t true, a small one, about a casserole dish and a borrowed pan. I wanted to march over there. He put his hand on my arm and said, “Marl. You don’t argue with a rumor. It feeds on you. You just keep doing the next right thing and let the rumor get hungry.”

A check I did not mail

There was one night, I will tell you, when I nearly gave up.

It was the third Sunday after the meeting. I sat at my kitchen table with the porch light on and a cup of decaf going cold. I had my own checkbook open in front of me, the one with the little roosters on it that Walt hated and I loved. And I wrote a check.

To the Elk Creek Fire Auxiliary. Two thousand three hundred eighty-six dollars and 00/100. I put the date. I signed it, with the capital M the way I always do.

I looked at it for a long time.

I could afford it. That is what stunned me. If I put that check in an envelope and left it in Bernice’s mailbox, the matter would be over. The whispering would stop within the week. The kind thing, the Christian thing, would have been to take the cost on myself and let everyone go back to their lives.

But the money would be there, and so would the reason. For the rest of my life, in the minds of those women, a bookkeeper had made up a shortage out of her own pocket. A little voice would say: well, she paid it back, didn’t she? And a second voice would answer: why would she, if she hadn’t done it?

I tore the check in half. Then in quarters. Then I put it in the stove, in the little cast iron wood stove Walt installed in the kitchen the winter before he died, and I watched the rooster go.

I sat there a long while. I said out loud to the empty kitchen, “I did not take that money.”

It sounded very small. But it was the first time anyone had said it, even me, and I had needed to hear it in a voice.