The Jar at the Elevator Scale

He did not go through the line. He did not put anything in the jar.

I did not feel good about it, and I want to be honest about that. I felt like a person who had set down something heavy and found that her arms still hurt.

By two in the afternoon, Galen had counted the jar twice and the lockbox once.

He sat on his bucket with the receipt book in his lap and a sheaf of checks fanned in his hand, and he looked at me with an expression I could not read.

“Twenty-four hundred and seventeen dollars,” he said. “That’s the farmers. That’s not counting Ken’s match, and it’s not counting the nine hundred.”

I could not answer.

“We could buy both,” he said.

“We could.”

“With seventeen dollars over for the first fuel bill.” He gave a short laugh and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Candice, I’ve been chief for eleven years, and I have never seen anything like that. Not once.”

I looked back at the jar. It was empty.

Bryan was standing beside it. I had not seen him come over.

He had his hand on the picture. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

But he looked at the empty jar for a long time, and then he put his arm around my shoulders, and we stood there while the trucks went across the scale behind us.

I ordered the tubes Monday morning from the school office.

On Thursday night, the eighth, Haverly Volunteer Fire Department held its monthly board meeting in the station, as it does on the second Thursday of every month, with a pot of coffee and a plate of Hattie Thorne’s bars on the folding table.

I was not there. Members and their spouses are allowed, but I stayed home with Reagan and a puzzle, because I did not trust my face.

Galen called me at nine-thirty. I could hear the cold air in the bay behind him.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “Nineteen of twenty-four members showed.”

“And?”

He told me what happened in his plain way, and I will tell it back the same way. Jason had come in early.

He had set a cardboard box on the table in front of Galen, and in the box were the checkbook, the ledger, the bank statements and the key to the lockbox.

He stood up before Galen called the meeting to order, and he said that he wanted to resign as treasurer and tell the board the whole of it before anybody else did.

He told it all. April, the thirty-one hundred, the shop loan, the beans, the nine hundred dollars from Minnesota, and the line he had given Galen about recertification.

He did not leave out one piece. Galen said it took four minutes.

When Jason finished, nobody spoke for a while.

Then Bev Redmond, who has been a dispatcher for the department for twenty-two years, said that a resignation was not enough.

Galen said that the motion on the floor was to remove Jason Thorne as treasurer and from every office in the department, and to ask for repayment of the full amount of the shortfall, which came to twenty-two hundred dollars once his nine hundred was counted.

Someone seconded it.

It carried, eighteen to one.

I asked Galen who the one was.