Rosettes on the Church Steps

What Gordy said

I have to tell you what happened after that, because it was not the end of it, and I think the end of it is the part that matters.

Gordy told Marit that night. All of it. That he had been behind on his own taxes on the acreage, that the county letter had scared him, that he had taken Mom’s envelope out of the box in the noon rush and told himself she would never miss one table’s money.

That was his reason. I have thought about it a great deal. It is a reason. It is not an excuse.

There is no excuse for looking an eighty-one-year-old woman in the face and telling her that the money she fried for since four in the morning was lost.

He told Marit about the scope, too. He had bought it with money from a policy commission that came in the same week, he said, and he had felt so guilty about the envelope that he had gone and spent the commission on something for himself, to feel normal again.

I do not know if that is the whole truth. Marit believes it.

I have decided it is not my business to believe it or not. My mother got her money back, and he has to live with how.

On Sunday morning, Gordy went to Borghild after the service and told her the committee needed a new person to run the bazaar cash box next year.

He did not say why. Borghild did not ask. Everybody in that fellowship hall knew anyway, or thought they did.

He has not counted money at that church since. He still comes every Sunday.

He sits in the same pew he always sat in, three from the back on the left, and he sings the hymns, and he does not stay for coffee hour.

On Sunday afternoon he came to Mom’s house by himself. I was not there. Mom told me about it later.

She said he stood on the back step with his cap in his hands and could not get the words out for a while.

“What did he say?” I asked her.

“He said he was sorry he told me it was lost,” Mom said. “He said that was the worst part. Not the money. That he looked at me and said it was lost.”

“What did you say?”

Mom was quiet for a minute. She was at the stove, warming coffee. She did not turn around.

“I told him he was family,” she said. “And I told him next October he could come over and help me fry. He has big hands. He’d be good at the batter.”

Monday

On Monday morning I took the morning off from the bus garage one more time. Arne covered the radio again. He did not ask why. He just said, “Tell your mom good morning.”

I picked Mom up at nine. She was waiting on her front step in her cranberry red coat, with her purse on her arm and a bank envelope in her hand.

Inside it were her tax statement and seven hundred twelve dollars.

We drove to the courthouse. It is an old brick building on the hill, with a clock in the tower that is right twice a day and a treasurer’s office on the first floor with a long wooden counter.

The woman at the window has worked there since I was in high school. She smiled when she saw Mom and said, “Inga. Right on time. The Monday after the bazaar.”

“A little late this year,” Mom said. “But here I am.”

She counted out the money on the counter, bill by bill, the fives and tens and ones from the church steps and the twenties from her mailbox.

The woman at the window counted it back. It came out right the first time.

Mom took her receipt. She folded it once and put it in her purse.

Then she turned to me and took my arm, the way she used to take Dad’s, and we walked out of the courthouse into the October sun together.

Mom paid her taxes at the courthouse window that Monday, in person, in cash.