Dean had paid the supplier exactly what the supplier was owed, and not one dollar more, and kept the rest. It takes a town that trusts a man and a bank deposit slip nobody else ever reads.
But Marcy Voss runs that stand like a battleship. Every home game she stands at the counter with a clipboard and counts every bun and every can of nacho cheese going out and coming back. I took her a pie and told her what I was doing, and she walked out to her garage without a word and came back with a cardboard box of every sheet.
“I’ve been sitting on a feeling since November,” she said. “I counted a homecoming night that came to eleven hundred and forty dollars, and Dean told Kay it was slow. I thought I’d miscounted. I’m sixty-two, I thought I was losing it.”
“You were not losing it,” I said.
“Well.” Her mouth went thin. “I’d like to find out I wasn’t.”
We sat at her kitchen table three evenings with the clipboard sheets, the price board photographed off the stand wall, and the Cash-Wise receipts she had stapled to every night. Eighteen events, six football and twelve basketball.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
The number came to $6,732 net, and that was a number we could defend in front of anybody. Dean had reported $1,268.
I wrote the whole picture on one sheet of paper. Wreaths, $7,008. Concession stand, $6,732. Together $13,740.
The account held $2,100. Eleven thousand, six hundred forty dollars was missing.
Kay’s Kitchen
Kay Brandvold was our postmaster for thirty-one years, and she has been president of the boosters for six. She is seventy-one, small and sharp, with a laugh like a screen door.
She also signed the second line on every check Dean wrote, and I knew she would take it harder than anyone.
I told her at her kitchen table over decaf, laying out the pink copies and my one page of math. She turned the pages with one finger, the way she used to sort mail.
“I signed those checks,” she said at last. “He’d bring me a stack on a Sunday after church. I never looked past his handwriting.”
“Nobody did,” I said.
“That’s no excuse. I’m the president.” She took off her glasses and pressed her fingers against her eyes. “Kris, I’ve known that man since he was a teenager busing tables at the Corner Cafe.”
“Don Reiner has to hear about this,” she said. “Eleven thousand dollars is grand theft in North Dakota.”
“I’m not saying never,” I said. “I’m saying not first. The first thing I want is for those girls to get their uniforms and go to Sioux Falls. After that, if the board wants to call Don, I will drive to the sheriff’s office with you.”
Kay looked at me for a while. “And what do you want for Dean?”
“I want him to say it,” I said. “Out loud. The number. To the girls and the parents and the people who clapped for that plaque. Not in an office with the door shut, where he can call it an accounting error and hand us a check and go on being Volunteer of the Year.”
“That’s cruel, Kris.”
“I don’t want it to be.” I thought about how to say it. “I want him to have the chance to say it himself, before somebody says it for him. If he says it, I think he can still live here. If somebody else says it, he can’t.”
She was quiet a long time.
“The Spring Sendoff Supper is Sunday week,” she said finally. “The third Sunday in March. The whole town comes, and he reads the treasurer’s report between the pie and the raffle, the way he does every year.”
“Then let him read it,” I said.
She put her glasses back on. “If he reads a real one, I’ll never say another word about this outside the board. If he reads a false one, I’ll let the girls do the talking.”
At the door she took my hand in both of hers. “He gets one chance first,” she said.