Sunday morning I got up, put on my good dress, drove to that church, and sat down in the eighth pew on the left, which is where I have sat since 1999 and which nobody had told me I could not sit in.
I did not go there to make a scene in the Lord’s house. I went because it was Sunday and because I am a member of that congregation and have been longer than that man has been alive.
What I did not know, and would not have asked for, is that Nadine Sowers had spent Saturday on the telephone.
Nadine is seventy-six and she is the church treasurer and she has counted that money with a partner, two people together, never one alone, since 1994. That is not her being suspicious. That is how you do it, and it is in the bylaws, and the reason it is in the bylaws is so that no woman with a key ever has to stand in a vestibule and be called a thief.
The benevolence box by the door gets emptied every Friday and the count sheet gets two signatures.
She brought the book to church.
Before the announcements, the head deacon stood up and said the church had some business to handle in front of the body, which is not something that happens twice in a lifetime.
Nadine read the count sheet for that Friday. Fifty dollars out of the benevolence box, moved to the assistance fund, signed by two people, and the second signature on that line is the administrator’s own.
He had emptied it himself. He signed for it on Friday, and forgot he had done it, and by Tuesday he had a woman by the sleeve in the vestibule threatening her with the police in front of two deacons.
Nobody in that sanctuary made a sound. It is a different quiet in a church.
Then Ruth Ann Pilcher stood up in the fourth row and said that when her husband passed in 2011 the only person from that building who came to her house on the second day, when everybody else had already gone home, was the woman who cleans it.
Then somebody else stood up. I am not going to name all of them. It went on a while and I sat there with my hands in my lap and I could not look up.
The pastor asked the administrator to make it right in front of the body. He did, and he did not do it well, and I have decided that a man doing a hard thing badly is still a man doing it.
He handed me my key back at the front of the church.
The board voted that same afternoon to put the custodian’s position in writing with a raise and a title and a line about how accusations get handled, which Nadine wrote and which is now in the bylaws.
I cleaned that sanctuary Monday morning, same as always. The pews needed dusting the way they always do after a full house, and it was a full house.