Chapter 2
The confirmation photographs were taken at twelve-forty.
It was the strangest forty minutes of Arlene Kasparek's life. Children in white dresses and dark jackets stood in two rows on the steps of the church with the bishop in the middle, and the mothers fussed with hair and hems, and the fathers stood at the edges of the frame with their hands in their pockets, and every adult in that photo was thinking about the same thing at the same time. Arlene stood in the back row because Nadine from the guild had physically steered her there with a hand on her elbow, saying, "You stand in the middle this time, Arlene, you hear me?" and Arlene had said, "The middle is for officers of the parish," and Nadine had said, "Well, today the middle is for you, and if Marlene Duclos doesn't like it she can take it up with the bishop."
Marlene was not in the photograph. Arlene noticed. She also noticed that two people whose names she'd known for twenty years gave her a wide berth on the church steps, and one of them, Roger Halvorsen, who had served on the council with Marlene for four years, actually turned his back and talked to his wife in a low voice until the photo was over.
Herb Sorenson came up to Arlene as the group broke up and put his hand on her arm.
"I should've stood up," he said. "When she said that about you. I should've stood up right then. Walter was at my wedding, Arlene. He carried my mother's coffin. I should've stood up the second she opened her mouth."
"It's all right, Herb."
"It isn't."
"No," Arlene said. "It isn't. But it's done."
The vote happened at one o'clock in the hall, with the folding tables still out, and the motion was to rename the kitchen after Walter Kasparek. Deacon Paul read the motion. The bishop did not speak for it or against it; he stood at the back of the hall with his hands folded into his cassock sleeves and let the parish decide. The vote was sixty-one to nine. Roger Halvorsen voted no. So did Marlene's cousin Bernadette and two of Marlene's neighbors from the south side of town. The other five no votes Arlene didn't know. She didn't ask. She sat in the second row and kept her hands folded in her lap and did not say a word, and when the count was read she only nodded once, the way a farm wife nods when the rain finally comes.
Marlene's sister-in-law, a bent woman named Corinne who had lived in the same house on Fourth Street for forty years, came up to Arlene after the vote and said, "I'm sorry about what happened today, Arlene. I've known Marlene a long time. I don't know what's gotten into her."
Arlene looked at Corinne for a long moment.
"She did it," Arlene said. "She painted over the plaque with her own hands. I saw her."
Corinne's face changed. It went blank the way a face does when a person has been handed information they don't want and can't unhear.
"When?"
"Two years ago. In October. I came in early to clean the kitchen and she was up on the chair by the door with a little can of gold paint and a brush. She told me she was freshening up the plaque." Arlene's voice stayed level. "She already had her brush into the corner. I didn't know what she was covering until later."
Corinne stood there with her mouth slightly open.
"You knew," Arlene said. "You've known since then. You've known what she did and you never said anything."
Corinne turned and walked away without answering. Arlene watched her go. She did not feel anything in particular, which surprised her. She had spent two years imagining this conversation and it turned out to weigh almost nothing.
The bishop came up to her on the way out.
"May I come to your house this week?" he said. "Wednesday, if you'll have me. There are things in the ledger that don't match what I remember, and I'd like to ask you some questions in private, where nobody has to perform."
"Yes," Arlene said. "Wednesday. I'll put coffee on."
She drove home alone. The slush on Highway 22 was gray and granular under her tires, and the fields on both sides were the color of old newspaper, and the sun never came out. Her house was a small white place at the end of a gravel lane with a two-stall garage, and Walter's tool belt was still in the trunk of her car from the fall when she'd thought she might sell the house and then hadn't. She parked, sat in the driver's seat for a while listening to the engine tick, went inside, and made herself a sandwich she did not eat.
Then she opened the bottom drawer of the china cabinet.
There were three things in that drawer she had not looked at in years: Walter's confirmation certificate from 1958, a photograph of the two of them at the parish picnic the summer before he died, and a white business-size envelope with her name on it in her husband's handwriting.
She had opened that envelope exactly once. The night after his funeral. She had read what was inside, put it back, closed the drawer, and never opened it again for twenty-six years.
She opened it now.
Inside were two pieces of paper. One was a handwritten letter, six lines long, the handwriting shaky because it was written in his last month. The other was a check stub, dated August of 1998, made out to St. Casimir's Catholic Parish, in the amount of twenty-two thousand dollars.
And underneath, in the memo line, in Walter's careful block letters:
FOR THE KITCHEN—AND THE SECOND ONE.
Arlene sat down at the kitchen table with the letter and the stub in front of her and did not move for a very long time.
The letter said:
Arlene. If the church ever asks for more than what I gave, you tell them no. There is one more thing and it is not for them to spend. It's for the school. I put it in the same place as the first one and I made sure it could not be moved without somebody noticing. I love you. Do not let them make you small. — W.
She read it four times. Then she folded it along the same creases her husband had made, and put it back into the envelope, and put the envelope back into the drawer, and closed the drawer, and sat with her hands flat on the kitchen table while the light went out of the windows one panel at a time.
At seven-twenty that evening, the phone rang.
It was Deacon Paul. His voice was shaky and very quiet. "Mrs. Kasparek, I'm sorry to call so late. The bishop asked me to inventory the cupboard under the sink before I turn everything over to the auditor. There's a second shelf in the back, behind the utility pipes. There was a long cardboard tube in it, like the ones they sell maps in. It's already been opened. The seal on the end is broken and the cap has been pushed back in, upside down."
Arlene's hand found the edge of the kitchen table.
"What's inside?"
"That's the thing, Mrs. Kasparek. I don't know yet. The tube is empty." Deacon Paul's breathing was audible over the phone. "But the cap is stamped with a diocesan seal, and the date on the seal is 1998, and the label on the tube says, in handwriting—Mrs. Kasparek, I think it's your husband's handwriting—it says 'St. Casimir's School Annex Fund, Hold in Trust.'"
Advertisement