“Inga, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your envelope is gone.”
Gordy said it by the coffee urns in the fellowship hall, with the two o’clock sun slanting through the basement windows.
My mother was eighty-one that October. She had been on her feet since four in the morning, and she still had a dish towel tucked into the waistband of her slacks because she had forgotten it was there.
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“Gone,” she said. It was not a question. She said it slowly, the way she used to read out spelling words when she helped at the country school, so she could be sure she had it right.
“I had every table’s envelope in the cash box,” Gordy said. “Yours was right on top. Then the soup line backed up into the stairwell at noon, and when I counted out at two, it wasn’t there.”
He spread his hands. Gordy Lien has big hands, an insurance man’s hands, clean and pink, with a class ring he still wears thirty-some years after high school.
He held them out like he was showing her they were empty.
“How much was it?” I asked. I already knew. I had been standing behind Mom’s table all morning, making change out of a coffee can and handing white bakery bags over the tablecloth.
“Six hundred forty,” Mom said, before Gordy could answer. “Sixty-four dozen at ten dollars a dozen. I sold out at a quarter to twelve. I gave the envelope to you myself, Gordon.”
“You did,” he said. “And I’m sick about it, I really am. I’ve looked under every table in this hall. Somebody must have reached in during the rush. There were three hundred people through here today.”
My sister Marit stood a few feet behind him, folding paper tablecloths into squares. She had stopped folding. She held one square against her chest and did not look at any of us.
“Well,” Mom said. She untucked the dish towel from her waistband, folded it in thirds, and laid it on the table beside the coffee urns. “Well. These things happen, I suppose.”
That was all she said. She picked up her purse, which had been under the table since six that morning, and she walked to the stairwell, one hand on the rail, the way she climbs stairs now.
I went after her. Behind me I heard Gordy say to somebody, in a low and sorry voice, that he felt terrible, just terrible, and that he would make a note of it for the committee.