The Pink Copy That Caught the Treasurer

At a quarter to six Kay walked to the microphone at the front of the hall and tapped it twice. The room quieted the way a room does for Kay.

“Evening, everybody. Before the pie and the raffle, we’ll hear our annual treasurer’s report. Dean?”

There was warm applause. They clap for him every year.

Dean took an index card from his breast pocket and adjusted his reading glasses. He straightened the card on the edge of the podium, the way a man straightens something he has said a hundred times.

“Thank you, Kay. Folks, I’m proud to report this year’s fundraising was a tough one. The wreath sale, as I told the parents in January, ran into supplier problems. We cleared about eight hundred thirty dollars on four hundred thirty-eight wreaths.”

He looked up. “And the concession stand had a slow season. Rain, gas prices, you know how it is. We netted twelve hundred sixty-eight dollars. All told, we’re sitting at two thousand one hundred dollars heading into spring.”

He smiled, a little rueful. “It’s not what we hoped for. But those girls worked hard.”

There was polite applause. A grandmother at the next table patted her husband’s arm.

I felt Kay’s hand close on my wrist under the table. Then she stood again and walked back up front as Dean turned to sit down.

“Dean,” she said into the microphone. “Hold on a minute, would you? There’s something else before the raffle.”

He stopped, still holding the index card.

“The girls would like to say something,” she said. “They’ve asked to. I’ve said they could.”

At the softball table, all twenty-two girls stood up together.

They lined up in the aisle in order of age, the nine-year-olds first and the fourteen-year-olds last. Royce stepped out and stood just behind them with his big hands at his sides.

Each girl held a pink slip of paper in both hands. In the quiet room, in the March light through the Legion windows, it looked like something folded for communion.

Dean stood at the podium and watched them come. I saw the smile go slowly out of his face, the way color goes out of a sky.

Piper, who is nine and gap-toothed, held her copy so tightly that it had a crease through the middle. Kenzie Stoltz was crying silently and did not wipe it. Brynn Larsen’s chin was up, and her grandmother, two rows from the front, had both hands pressed against her mouth.

Maddie stepped out of the line.

The microphone had been set too high for her. She reached up and tilted it down with both hands, the way she adjusts her batting helmet.

Dean did not move. The index card trembled, just slightly, in his fingers.

“Mr. Stroud,” my daughter said, and her voice was small and clear in the speakers and went all the way to the back wall.

“You told us to keep the pink copy.”

She held hers out in both hands, the way you hold out something you have carried a long way.

“I kept mine.”