The Forty One Families at Wednesday Supper

Why I Didn’t Call Anyone Else

The money was cash handed to a friend. There was no account, no receipt, no signature.

Every dollar of it was a gift that people gave on trust, and the person they trusted was Kristi.

I was not going to put a woman who taught my daughter Sunday school in the back of a squad car for flowers, not before I gave her every chance to make it right.

I called her that night. She picked up on the second ring, bright as anything, and asked how the rental was.

I told her about Lisa Dahl and the eighty dollars, and I heard her go quiet.

“It’s coming,” she said. “Amy, I’ve got it, I just haven’t had a chance to get to the bank. Things have been crazy with Megan. I’ll bring it by this weekend.”

She did not come that weekend. I called the next Tuesday and she said the bank had put a hold on something.

I called that Friday and she did not pick up. She did not pick up after that.

Pastor Tom

Pastor Tom Reese has been our pastor for eleven years.

I went to see him on a Monday.

I sat in his office with the space heater ticking and set the envelope on his desk, and I told him everything, Lisa Dahl and Jan Peterson and the three phone calls.

He did not say anything for a long time. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

Then he opened his desk drawer and took out a clipboard with a single sheet on it.

“She left this in the office,” he said. “The night of the collection. She said she’d take it to you so you could write thank-yous. Then she forgot it, and I didn’t think about it again.”

It was the sign-up sheet. Forty-one names, some in pen and some in pencil, some just a last name, some with the whole family.

The Olsons. Arnie and June Pederson. The Dahls. Pastor Tom and his wife, Carol.

“Forty-one families,” he said. “Most of them about eighty dollars, I’d guess. Some more, some less. The Pedersons put in two hundred, June told me. That’s how you get to thirty-four hundred.”

He asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted it to stop hurting.

I said I wanted the money back for my kids, and I wanted those forty-one families to know their gift did not just disappear.

“Matthew eighteen,” he said. “You know it. You go to her first. Then you go with one or two others. Then, if she won’t listen, you bring it to the church. Not the sheriff. Not the paper. The church.”

“I went to her first,” I said. “Three times.”

“Then let me be the one or two,” he said. “Let me try.”

The Meetings She Didn’t Come To

Pastor Tom called Kristi that afternoon and asked her to come to his office on Thursday with me.

She said she would. On Wednesday night she texted him that Megan had a dress fitting and she could not make it.

He set another meeting for the next Monday. She canceled that morning. She said her mother was sick in Alexandria. Maybe she was. I have never asked.

By then it was the week of the wedding. Pastor Tom was doing the service himself, at our church, on Saturday the 21st. He called me and asked if I would wait until after.

“Megan didn’t do this,” he said. “She’s twenty-three and she’s marrying a nice boy from Starbuck, and I’m not going to let her walk down that aisle under this. Give me the wedding. Then we’ll finish it.”

I said yes. I want that on the record, because I have been angry for a lot of this story, but I was not going to ruin a girl’s wedding day over her mother’s choices.

We did not go to the wedding. We sent a card.

Ryan drove past the church on Saturday afternoon to get gas, and he told me later he saw the flowers through the open doors, white roses on the end of every pew, and he had to pull over for a minute.