The Playground Behind the Church

Tuesday night

When the gavel came down, we walked out into the town hall parking lot. It was the first week of October, two years ago now, forty-four degrees, and the sky over the elevator was clear and hard with stars.

Ryan’s hand was shaking on the truck door. He had it on the handle and he was not opening it.

“I’m going over there,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Katie, that man just…”

“Ryan.” I said it quietly. “She’s sitting right there.”

He looked through the glass at Josie, buckled in the back seat of the crew cab with her notebook against her chest, looking straight ahead through the windshield at nothing. His shoulders came down an inch at a time.

Here is what I know about a town of 1,140. A council vote in Elm Prairie stands until somebody gets elected to undo it, and arguing with it only makes the next Thanksgiving a cold one. It would have gone straight into the Gazette, where my ten-year-old would have read about her own parents in the letters column. I wanted her to see something finished, not something fought over.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with the notebook open in her lap, in the light of the little lamp shaped like a mushroom. She had her pencil in her hand. She had not written anything.

“Mama,” she said, without looking up. “Do I have to give it back?”

“Give what back, baby?”

“The money. To everybody.” She turned a page. “Mr. Gruber gave me a hundred dollars in quarters. He brought them in a lard pail. It took me and Dad an hour to roll them. If we don’t have a playground, they gave me the money for nothing.”

I sat down on the edge of her bed. I am a night nurse at the county hospital. I have told families the worst news of their lives in hallways at three in the morning, in a voice that is low and level. I opened my mouth to use it.

Nothing came out.

I sat there a long time. Finally I put my arm around her, and she leaned in, and the notebook slid down between us.

“Nobody is getting their money back,” I said. “You hear me? Nobody gave you that money for a vote. They gave it to you for a playground. And you are going to have one.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She nodded slowly, like that was an answer she could use. Then she was asleep, in about forty seconds, the way kids go when they finally let go of a thing. The pencil stayed in her hand.

Then I went out to the front porch in my socks, and I called a pastor.

The old parsonage lot

Marlin Lindquist has run St. Paul Lutheran, three blocks from the park, for nineteen years. He is a big, rumpled man with reading glasses pushed up into thinning hair, and he bought a lemonade from Josie every Saturday for two summers. He always paid with a five and never took the change.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Katie,” he said. “I heard. I was going to call you in the morning.”

“Pastor, I know it’s late. I need to ask you something, and you can say no.”

“Ask me.”

“Your church has that lot behind the building. Where the old parsonage stood.”

“The old parsonage lot,” he said slowly. “Half an acre, flat as a table. We tore the house down because the foundation went, and nobody has done a thing with it since except the deer.”

“Josie has a playground kit and nowhere to put it.”

“Our church council meets Monday night,” he said. “Seven o’clock, in the basement. I can’t promise you what nine Lutherans will do, because I have never once been able to promise that. But I can promise you this. Bring Josie. Bring that notebook.”

“Why the notebook?”

“Because I have a feeling,” he said, “that it will do the talking.”