The Quilt I Pieced a Second Time

The Coffee Can

She ran the raffle. She sold the tickets and she kept the roll and she held the coffee can with the stubs in it.

She drew the name herself, up front, with the microphone in her other hand.

Two dollars a ticket, or three for five. We sold twenty-four hundred dollars of them, which is more than we have ever sold.

People drive in from three towns for the Pleasant Grove supper. The quilt was the prettiest one we had put up in years.

I am not going to tell you I watched her slip a stub. I did not see it. I want to be fair to her even now, because fairness was the only thing I had left to hold that night.

But a coffee can is a coffee can. A woman who wants a thing badly, and holds the can alone, is a woman nobody is watching.

Dale drove us home with the heater ticking and the fields black on both sides of the gravel.

“You going to say something,” he said. It was not a question. Dale does not ask questions. He lays them down and waits.

“Say what,” I said. “That I think she pulled her own girl’s name? I did not see it. You did not see it. Nobody did.”

He chewed on that for a mile. “Doyle could ask her.” Doyle is our pastor, a kind man who hates conflict worse than I do.

“And then what,” I said. “Doyle asks Rhonda if she cheated. She cries. Katie cries.”

“Half the church takes her side, because she buried her husband’s mother this spring. The other half takes mine. Come Easter we have two churches in one building.”

Dale drove. The dash lights were green on his face.

“She is your brother’s wife,” I said. “You want to be the one tells your brother his wife is a thief. Over a quilt.”

He did not. I knew he did not. He is a decent man, and that was the decent man’s trap, the same one I was in.