The last post
By two o’clock the tower stood. By three the slides were bolted on and the rope bridge hung like a clothesline. The swing beam took eight men to lift, on Chief Moeller’s count, and it settled into its brackets with a sound like a church door closing.
At twenty to four Ryan called out, “Last one.”
It was the final support post, the one under the exit slide. The hole was dug, the post was set and braced, and the bag of concrete sat next to it with its mouth open.
Josie stood beside the hole with her coat unzipped and her hair coming out of her hat. She had been handing bolts up and down ladders since seven in the morning, and she had grease on her chin.
“Wait,” she said. “Dad, wait. Don’t pour yet.”
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“Pastor,” she said. “Do you have an empty pill bottle?”
He blinked. “A what?”
“A pill bottle. The orange kind with a lid. I need it for one minute.”
I had one. It lived in my purse, full of safety pins and loose change, and I dumped it out and walked it over to her. She held it in both hands and looked around at the crowd, which had gone quiet again.
She pulled a folded paper from her coat pocket. It was a photocopy of the notebook pages, all 212 names, that Pastor Lindquist had run off for her on the church office copier that morning. She rolled it into a tight scroll and slid it into the bottle.
Then she reached into her other pocket and took out a single quarter.
“This is the first one,” she said. “The very first quarter I ever got as a tip. A lady at the elevator gave it to me, the first Saturday. I never spent it.”
She put it in the bottle.
She looked around. And then, so quietly I almost missed it, she said, “Mr. Gruber?”
He had gotten up from his lawn chair. He had come up behind the crowd without any of us noticing, and he stood at the edge of the circle with his fists jammed in his coat pockets.
“I have one more,” he said.
He reached into his shirt pocket with a hand that was not quite steady, and he took out a quarter. It was dull and old, with a worn date on it. He turned it over in his fingers for a long moment.
“This is from Verna’s jar,” he said. “The last one. I kept it back.”
He held it out. Josie took it, and she did not drop it into the bottle. She closed his fingers around it first, with both of her small hands, and held them there for a second.