Rosettes on the Church Steps

Why I did not say it

I have had people ask me since why I did not just march into the fellowship hall that Sunday and say it out loud. Some people would have. I understand that.

I could have stood up at coffee hour and said, “Gordy, I saw you pay cash for a rifle scope on Tuesday. Where did that money come from?”

And a room full of Lutherans would have gone very quiet.

But my sister would have been standing in that room. Marit would have had to choose, right there between the coffee urns and the bars, between her mother and her husband, in front of the whole congregation she has belonged to since her baptism.

I could not prove a thing. And if I was wrong, I would have shamed a man in front of his church for buying a scope.

If I was right, I would have shamed my sister just the same. Either way, Marit paid.

I thought about calling the sheriff. Mom would not have it. When I mentioned it on Sunday afternoon in her kitchen, she set down her coffee cup so hard it rang on the saucer.

“No,” she said. “We do not call the law on family over money at a church bazaar. Your father would turn over in his grave.”

So I did not say anything to anybody. Not Marit, not the pastor, not Borghild, not even Arne, at first. I lay awake two nights and looked at the ceiling.

And on Wednesday, driving home from the garage at four, I went past the church and saw the sign for the downtown fall walk, the Saturday after next.

The shops stay open, people come up from the river trail, and everybody walks Water Street with a cup of cider.

I pulled over in front of the church. I looked at the steps.

They are wide stone steps, worn smooth in the middle, and they get the morning sun from the east until almost noon.

There is a big maple beside them that turns orange every October. I had walked up those steps my whole life.

I had been confirmed at the top of them. I had never once thought of them as a place to sell anything.

The kitchen

I went straight to Mom’s house. She was in her kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a paper calendar from the funeral home, the kind with a picture of a covered bridge for every month.

“How many rosettes could you make if you had help?” I asked.

She looked up at me over her glasses. “What on earth for?”

“The fall walk is a week from Saturday. Half the county comes through downtown. People will pay ten dollars a dozen for rosettes on a cold morning before they pay three dollars for a cup of cider.”

“The bazaar is over, Solveig.”

“I’m not talking about the bazaar.” I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.

“I’m talking about you, on the church steps, in the morning sun, with your own table and your own cash box.”

She did not answer for a long time. She turned her coffee cup around on the saucer, once, twice.

Outside her window a squirrel was burying something in the flower bed where her peonies had been.

“Your father’s cash box is still in the basement,” she said at last. “The blue one. From when he sold sweet corn off the back of the truck.”

“I know it is.”

“I’d have to ask Pastor about the steps.”

“I already did,” I said. “I called him from the car. He said the steps belong to the church, and you belong to the church, so he doesn’t see the problem. He said he’d buy two dozen.”

Mom laughed. It was a small laugh, but it was the first one I had heard out of her since Gordy stood by the coffee urns and held out his empty hands.

“Well,” she said. “We’d need eggs.”