The Pink Copy That Caught the Treasurer

The Pink Copy

Maddie slid her pink carbon copy of the wreath order across the kitchen table and put one finger on a line of tiny print, and I understood that our booster treasurer had been lying to us since January.

It was a Tuesday night in late February, a little after nine. The dishwasher was running, and my thirteen-year-old was supposed to be doing her pre-algebra.

Instead she had a calculator, a Pop-Tart box, and the look she gets at shortstop when she has already decided where the ball is going.

“Mom, read this part,” she said. “At the bottom.”

The line was printed in gray ink so small that I had to hold the page under the lamp. It said: Your group keeps $16.00 of every $28.00 wreath sold.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because I had sat in the Verdell school cafeteria in January with forty other parents and heard Dean Stroud tell us something very different.

The booster account held $2,100. That was every dime the girls had raised all fall, wreaths and concession stand together, and Dean had read the number off an index card in his careful, apologetic voice.

By the math on that pink page, it should have held more than thirteen thousand.

“Thirty-one wreaths, times sixteen,” Maddie said, tapping the calculator with her tongue between her teeth. “That’s four ninety-six for the club. I turned in eight hundred sixty-eight dollars in the Folgers can, Mom. I counted it twice.”

I looked at my daughter, and my stomach dropped.

“Hand me the legal pad,” I said.

Keep the Pink

I should tell you who Dean Stroud is, because nobody in Verdell, North Dakota, would have believed it of him.

Verdell has nineteen hundred people, one stoplight, a Legion hall, a co-op elevator, and a high school gym that still smells like the varnish from 1974.

Dean has been treasurer of the Verdell Girls Softball Boosters for nine years. He is fifty-four, a big soft-spoken man who runs the crop insurance office on Main Street, and he announces the home games over the loudspeaker in the same green windbreaker.

Three years ago the town gave him a plaque at the Legion hall that said Volunteer of the Year. He cried a little. I was there, and I clapped as hard as anyone.

Last October, at the wreath kickoff, he did something I had admired at the time. He got down on one knee in front of every girl in the program, even the nine-year-olds, and handed her a three-part order book.

“White copy goes to the company,” he told them. “Yellow copy goes to me. The pink copy is yours. Keep it.”

“Why?” one of the little ones asked.

“Because pink is proof,” he said. “Pink is how nobody can ever say you didn’t turn it in.”

Maddie kept hers in a Pop-Tart box on her dresser, with her softball medals and a rock from the Missouri River she believes is a dinosaur bone. She sold thirty-one wreaths at twenty-eight dollars apiece, mostly to the neighbors who buy her Girl Scout cookies.

The club had sold four hundred thirty-eight wreaths, according to the delivery sheet Kay Brandvold keeps from the day the semi unloaded at the elevator.

Four hundred thirty-eight wreaths, sixteen dollars each, left $7,008 for the girls.

In January Dean had told us the supplier raised its price after the order, that freight had gone through the roof, and that we cleared about a dollar ninety a wreath. “Everybody’s squeezed,” he said. That came to about $832.