The Pink Copy That Caught the Treasurer

The Liars’ Table

The deposit was due on the twentieth, twelve days out.

I told Hank Ostrander enough, over the counter at the Farm and Home Supply: the booster account was short, and I needed to cover the girls’ uniform deposit for a few weeks without involving the school or the bank.

Hank is sixty-six, with a gray crew cut and a voice that has been shouting over grain augers for forty years. He is also the unofficial king of the table at the Verdell elevator where eight or nine old farmers meet every morning at six to drink coffee and lie about their yields.

Hank listened with both elbows on the counter and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. “How short?”

I told him eleven thousand and some.

“Three thousand one hundred for the uniform deposit,” he said. “Not a gift. A loan to the girls, to be paid back by whoever took it. You write it down, Kris, and you put my name on it.”

“Hank, I can’t ask you to…”

“You didn’t ask. I offered.” He was already writing a check on the counter with the pen from the feed ticket. His hand was not entirely steady. “I’ll talk to the table. I won’t tell them why. They won’t ask, because they’re men.”

Two days later a Folgers can sat on the counter at the Farm and Home, with a slit cut in the plastic lid and a piece of masking tape that said Girls Softball in Hank’s block printing.

By Friday it held twenty-five hundred dollars in tens and twenties.

Arvilla Strand, who has run the Legion Auxiliary since before I was born, brought a bank envelope to my classroom door on her lunch hour. “The rainy-day fund doesn’t need all of what’s in it,” she said. It held $1,550.

Three thousand one hundred, plus twenty-five hundred, plus fifteen fifty: $7,150. That was the uniform deposit, the tournament entry, and three nights of hotel rooms in Sioux Falls, to the dollar.

That night I sat with Maddie on her bed. I would not do this without her, because she was the one who found it.

I told her all of it. I did not soften the number.

“Mr. Stroud gave me a baseball card once,” she said. “When I was seven. He said I had a good arm.”

“I know.”

“Is he a bad person?”

“I think he’s a person who did a bad thing,” I said. “A lot of them, over a lot of months. Those are different, but not as different as I wish they were.”

She thought about that. “What happens Sunday?”

“Kay’s going to let the girls speak before the raffle. All twenty-two, each with her pink copy.”

I watched her working on something behind her eyes.

“Can I go first?” she said.

“Maddie, you don’t have to.”

“I know.” She picked at the corner of the bedspread. “He told us pink was how nobody could say we didn’t turn it in. I turned it in. I want to be the one who tells him I kept mine.”

I did not tell her yes that night. I called Royce up, and the three of us sat on that bed for an hour, and when we were through he said, “I’ll be right behind her. The whole time.”

The Sendoff Supper

The Verdell Legion hall holds two hundred and fifty folding chairs. On the third Sunday in March, every one was full, and people stood along the back wall in their church clothes holding paper plates of fried chicken.

Royce and Maddie sat at the softball table with twenty-two girls in green and gold Verdell jerseys, from nine-year-old Piper Kessler up to the fourteen-year-olds. Each had a pink piece of paper folded in her back pocket. I had given every family the same instruction, and nobody had asked a question.

The sheriff, Don Reiner, was there too. He comes every year for the chicken. He stood at the very back by the coat rack in his tan uniform, because Kay had asked him on Friday to sit near the door and say nothing no matter what he saw.

Dean Stroud came in at ten past five in his Sunday suit, with Connie on his arm.

I had not expected Connie. She is the cook at the elementary school, a round, quiet woman in a cardigan who has fed half the town’s children for twenty years, and her hand on his arm was gripping, not resting.