The Cost
Sheriff Reiner did not arrest anyone that night. He walked up the side aisle after the applause, took Dean aside, and spoke to him for about ninety seconds in a voice nobody else could hear. Then he left through the kitchen door, and I never learned what he said.
Some thought we were too soft. The board had decided not to file a complaint as long as every dollar came back. Kay kept Don Reiner’s number on a slip of paper in her purse, and she told Dean that if he missed one payment, she would make the call that same day.
He did not miss one.
On Wednesday he sold his bass boat, a nineteen-foot Ranger he had kept under a tarp in his garage for six years. A man from Huron paid $9,400 in cash.
The remaining $2,240 he paid at $280 a month for eight months, on the first Monday of each month, to Marcy Voss at the concession stand door. She made him put it in her hand and wait while she counted.
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“Don’t need a speech,” she told him. “Just the money.”
She wrote every payment in pencil on a card taped to the inside of the stand wall, where anyone could look. I think that was Marcy’s idea of mercy, and I think it was a good one.
Within a month Dean had resigned as treasurer, as a Legion hall volunteer, and as the voice of the home games. The club elected a retired schoolteacher, with two signers on every check.
The Voss farm moved its crop insurance to a man in Mitchell in April. So did the Teigens and a half dozen others, quietly, over the summer. By fall Dean had lost nearly a third of his business.
Nobody said anything. They just stopped signing the renewals.
Connie did not leave him. She took over the checkbook and the credit cards, and cut up the cards at the kitchen table the Monday after the supper, in front of him.
He drives to Mitchell on Tuesday nights for a meeting in a church basement, and he has not missed one since March.
The girls’ new uniforms came the first week of May, green and gold, with names stitched on the back in a font Maddie calls way too fancy.