Chapter 6
The parish meeting was scheduled for one o'clock on the first Sunday in May.
The bishop said at the end of Mass that there would be a parish meeting in the hall after coffee and that everyone was welcome. He did not say what it was about. He did not need to. The whole parish had known for three weeks that something was coming, and half of them had been rehearsing what they would say when it did.
Arlene arrived at eleven-thirty, walked into the hall, and found that somebody had set the kitchen plaque down from the wall and put it on the table in the middle of the room.
She stopped in the doorway.
The plaque was not damaged. It had been cleaned. The bottom corner where her thumb had rubbed the paint off was now fully exposed, and the letters of Walter Kasparek's name were polished to a bright brass that caught the basement light. The rest of the plaque still had some of the old gold-painted face. The frame had been rehung with a small leather cord through the original eye screws. Somebody had worked on it carefully, the way you work on something you respect.
Nadine from the guild came up behind her.
"Herb did it," she said. "He took it down Tuesday and worked on it in his shop all week. He asked me not to tell you."
Arlene's throat moved once.
"He didn't have to do that."
"He wanted to."
The hall filled slowly. The farmers came in first, in their clean church shirts, and the retired electricians in their sport coats, and the ladies' guild in their cardigan sets. Roger Halvorsen came in with his wife and sat in the back corner. Corinne, Marlene's sister-in-law, sat in the second row and kept her eyes on the plaque. Bernadette, Marlene's cousin, did not come.
The bishop came in at twelve-fifty-five with Sana Farooq and Deacon Paul and a young priest Arlene didn't recognize, and the four of them sat down at the council table, and the bishop opened his folder and looked around the room.
"Before I begin," he said, "I want to say one thing. This is not a trial. This is a report. Every person in this room is a member of this parish and has a right to know how the money they gave was handled. When I am finished, we will have a discussion, and then we will vote on what steps the parish wants to take. Nobody will be asked to speak. Nobody will be asked to explain themselves. That is not what today is for."
He looked around the room.
"Marlene Duclos is present," he said. "She is here as a member of this parish and she is entitled to hear everything I am going to say. I have spoken with her privately. She has chosen not to speak today."
Arlene turned her head. Marlene was sitting alone at a table near the kitchen door, on the other side of the room. She was not in her cream blazer. She was in a plain gray jacket and no earrings and no visible makeup, and her hair was pulled back. She was looking at the table in front of her. She looked smaller than Arlene had ever seen her look.
The bishop opened his folder.
"In 1998, a parishioner of St. Casimir's made a gift of twenty-two thousand dollars to this parish for the construction of a kitchen addition to the parish hall. The donor requested anonymity and asked that the gift be used strictly for the addition and that no public credit be given. The addition was built in the summer and fall of 1998 and completed in December of that year.
"The same parishioner made a second, larger gift, thirty-one thousand dollars, to the St. Casimir's School Annex Fund, a restricted bequest held in trust by the parish council for the construction of a school annex that was proposed but never built. This second gift was received by the parish council on August 19, 1998. It was signed for by the sitting council president.
"Between 1999 and 2002, every dollar of that bequest was transferred out of the restricted fund and booked against general repair expenses. The restriction was never lifted by the parish council because, according to a meeting in 1999, the council was told the bequest had not cleared probate and had been returned to the estate. That was not true.
"Separately, between 2016 and 2024, roughly sixteen thousand dollars was paid out of the general building fund by the sitting council president for catering services, volunteer stipends, and small reimbursements to council members, most of which were never actually incurred. A private ledger recording these transactions was found in the council binder.
"The total amount of money taken from this parish over twenty-five years, on the basis of the audit completed last week, is approximately sixty-eight thousand dollars. The full audit is available in the parish office for anyone who wishes to read it. The auditor from the diocese is here to answer any questions about her methods."
The bishop closed the folder.
"Before I say anything else," he said, "I want to say a word about the man who gave the money.
"Walter Kasparek was a mechanic at the cooperage in this town for thirty-four years. He was on the hospital board from 1992 to 1998. He gave thirty-one thousand dollars to this parish in 1998 and never once asked for it to be recognized. He asked that the kitchen be named after him only if the parish chose to do so after his death. When the parish council did not choose to do so, he did not pursue it. When his plaque was painted over in the fall of 2022 by a person who has since admitted that she did it to protect her own claim to have funded the kitchen, he did not pursue it, because he had been dead for twenty-three years.
"His wife, Arlene, has cleaned this kitchen for free for two years. She has not asked this parish for one dollar. She has not asked this parish for one word of thanks. She has come in every Tuesday and Saturday and mopped this floor and washed these pans and swept this linoleum and set the coffee going before anyone else arrived. She was accused of theft in this room in front of her church, and she did not defend herself, and I want that on the record before I say anything else about what is going to happen next."
Arlene looked at her hands.
"I am not going to ask this parish to do anything to Marlene Duclos today," the bishop said. "The diocese is pursuing civil restitution. That is out of my hands and out of yours. What I am going to ask this parish to do is decide how it wants to be the kind of parish that Walter Kasparek gave his mother's money to. That is the only question in front of us."
He sat down.
For a moment nobody said anything.
Then Herb Sorenson stood up. He was in his church clothes and his hands were shaking but his voice was steady.
"I want to say something I should have said twenty-five years ago," he said. "In 1999, I sat in a council meeting where Marlene Duclos told us the school annex bequest had never arrived. I knew it was a lie. Walter had told me about the check himself. I was twenty-nine years old and I didn't say anything because I was scared of what it would do to me in this parish. I have been living with that for twenty-five years. I am not going to live with it another day."
He sat down.
Nadine stood up.
"I want to say something about Arlene," she said. "Arlene Kasparek has washed the dishes at every funeral in this parish for nine years. She has baked the bars for the soup suppers. She has cleaned this kitchen twice a week for two years without a dollar. And on Sunday three weeks ago, when Marlene Duclos pointed at her and told her to get out, I sat at my table and I did not stand up. I have been ashamed of that every day since. So I'm standing up now."
She sat down.
Corinne, Marlene's sister-in-law, stood up.
"I've known Marlene Duclos for forty years," she said. "She is my husband's sister. I've sat at her table at Christmas. I want the parish to know that I did not know she had done this. But I want the parish to also know that I have suspected for a while, and I have said nothing, and today I am saying it. I am sorry, Arlene. I am sorry for what she did and I am sorry for what I didn't."
She sat down.
And then a man Arlene didn't know, a young farmer from the south side of the parish, stood up, and said, "What I want to know is what we're going to do about the plaque. Are we going to put it back on the wall? Are we going to leave it on the table? Are we going to put it back with Walter's name on it, or are we going to leave it the way it is, half-painted?"
The bishop stood back up.
"That's the vote," he said.
Arlene stood up.
She did not plan to. She did not intend to. She simply found herself on her feet in the middle of the room, with the tote bag still on her shoulder and the audit report lying on the table in front of her, and she said:
"Before you vote, I want to say one thing."
Everyone turned.
"Walter asked me to say no if anybody ever asked for more," she said. "He asked me not to make a scene at church. He asked me to just be able to sit in church. And I did that for twenty-six years, and I sat in church, and I watched the plaque get painted over, and I watched the money go out of the fund, and I watched every woman in this room be told by Marlene Duclos what she was and was not allowed to do, and I never said anything, because Walter asked me not to."
She paused.
"But Walter didn't know about the second gift being stolen," she said. "Walter thought he was protecting me from the pressure of being known as the woman whose husband gave all the money. He didn't know that the reason I would have been known is that the money had gone missing. He didn't know that his wife would be sitting in the front row of the hall when it happened.
"So I want to say this while I still can: I forgive Marlene. Not because it wasn't wrong. It was. But because I'm going to need to sit in this church for the rest of my life, and so is she, and I'm not willing to lose the last twenty-five years of my husband's memory to a fight I don't want to be in for the next twenty-five."
She sat down.
Marlene Duclos stood up from her table near the kitchen door and walked out through it without saying anything. Nobody got up to help her.
The vote was to put the plaque back on the wall, at eye level, with Walter's name clean and the frame restored, on the same wall where it had always been. It was 74 to 3.
And before the room broke, the bishop stood up a final time and said, "One more thing," and the room sat back down, because there was something about the way he said it.
"The School Annex Fund is a restricted bequest," he said. "By diocesan law, a restricted bequest that cannot be spent as directed must be returned to the donor or the donor's estate. Walter Kasparek's estate closed in 2000. The estate's sole surviving beneficiary is Arlene Kasparek."
He looked at her.
"On paper," he said, "the remaining balance of the fund—whatever can be recovered from the audit, and whatever the diocese determines is still owed—belongs to you. Not to the parish. Not to the council. To you."
The hall went quiet.
"Now," the bishop said, "I'm going to ask Mrs. Kasparek a question in front of this room, because I think she is entitled to be asked in front of this room. Arlene—what do you want done with that money?"
Arlene looked at him for a long moment.
She did not answer right away. She looked around the hall. She looked at the folding tables and the linoleum and the kitchen door and the plaque on the middle table, with Walter's name bright in the basement light. She looked at Nadine and Herb and Corinne and all the people who had stood up and all the people who had not.
Then she said:
"I want the kitchen named after Walter. And I want the volunteer stipends paid. And I want the rest of it—if there is any rest of it—put into a parish fund that pays the volunteers who run this hall, in honor of every woman who has been told over the years that she should be grateful just to be allowed to work here for free."
The bishop nodded.
"So moved," he said.
Then, quietly, as the hall began to stir and the coffee urn began to gurgle again and the men and women of St. Casimir's started to stand up from their folding tables and move toward the coffee, the bishop leaned over to Arlene and said, in a voice only she and Deacon Paul could hear:
"There's one more thing I haven't said out loud yet. And it's why I want to talk to you in the sacristy when this is over."
Arlene turned her head.
"What."
"The auditor found something on Wednesday," the bishop said. "In the old council file cabinet, behind the checkbook box. There's a second plaque. It was in the same stack as the first one, back in 1998. It's been in the cabinet for twenty-seven years. It's never been hung. Nobody in this parish has ever seen it."
Arlene's hand tightened on her tote.
"What does it say?"
"It's a dedication plaque for the school annex," the bishop said. "And it has Walter's name on it too. But it has something else. It has a second donor listed, in the same hand, the same year."
He paused.
"There's a name under Walter's," he said. "Arlene, the second name is yours."
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