The Pancake Money Nobody Could Find

Bernice

You should know something about Bernice Rademacher, because I have heard people be unkind about her since, and I will not have it.

We have known each other forty-one years. Her husband Dwayne and my Walt rode the same engine. We were pregnant the same summer in 1982. When Walt died, Bernice was in my kitchen before I had called a single person. She sat with me at that table for four days and made the phone calls I could not make. She is the one who found the dress.

That woman loved my husband, and she loves me. I have no doubt of it, then or now.

Which is exactly what made it so hard. I could see her at those meetings in the weeks that followed, and she was suffering too. She would look at me across the room as if she wanted to say something, and then she would look at her agenda and go on to the next item. She had lost weight. Dwayne was home from the hospital and needed her, a township board member was asking her every day whether it was in the budget to make up the shortage, and she had a friend of forty-one years who had been the only person alone with the bag.

I think, if I’m honest, that she was afraid of exactly one thing. Not that I’d done it. That she would be the kind of woman who couldn’t tell.

And I will say this too. I could have gone to her. I could have sat down in her kitchen, with Dwayne’s pills on the counter, and said, “Bernice, please, look at the whole night drop.” I did not. I let my pride hold the door. I told myself it was dignity. I think part of it was dignity and part of it was a woman who was hurt and wanted her friend to come to her first.

So we both stood on opposite sides of the same fence for three weeks, and each of us waited for the other to cross.

The porch

It was a Wednesday morning, three weeks and a day after the meeting. A gray, damp morning in early November, with the last of the maple leaves stuck to the gravel. I was in my robe, in the kitchen, reading the obituaries, when I heard a truck in the drive. It was Dwayne’s old white Silverado, the one with the toolbox in the back.

I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. Bernice got out of the driver’s side and shut the door. She stood there for a moment beside the truck with her purse hanging off her shoulder, looking at my house like she had never seen it. She was holding something flat against her chest, under her coat. Her hand was pressing it to her.

She came up the walk slowly, and up the steps, and stood right in front of the door, and did not knock.

I stood on the other side of the glass in my robe and my slippers, and I watched her. She stood there a full minute. I saw her lips move. I think she was practicing.

I did not open the door. For one long minute I let her stand out there in the cold, and part of me was glad of it. I am not proud of that part, but I am not going to leave it out. She had left me alone at the head of that table. She could stand on my porch a minute.

Then she knocked. Three times, soft, the way you knock on a hospital door.

I opened it.

“Glenda,” she said. Her voice cracked in the middle of my name. “May I come in?”

“The coffee’s made,” I said.