The statement was still lying on the church basement table where the girl had left it, and I laid my hand flat on top of it before anyone else could move. I am Mabel Sorenson, eighty years old, the treasurer of the Sunday School fund at First Lutheran in Sioux Falls for twenty two years, and across from me sat Kayleigh, the young woman I had hired to keep the books after my eyes began to fail. She was staring at my hand. The coffee urn gurgled in the corner. Upstairs, I could hear the choir rehearsing the last verse of a hymn.
“Kayleigh,” I said, “this is the statement you told me had been lost.” I had found it in the second drawer of her desk under a stack of bulletins. It showed that between January and October, sixty two thousand, four hundred dollars had left the account of the Sunday School fund in small withdrawals, none above four hundred dollars. Every one had been made on a weekend. Every one had been made at a machine in the town of Flandreau, where the casino sits beside the river.
The girl, who was thirty one and had a baby at home, said nothing at first. Her mouth was trembling. At the far end of the table sat Pastor Lindgren, with the council president, Mr. Halvorsen, and three of the church ladies, who had come down for the quarterly meeting and found a good deal more than minutes. I laid the statement in the middle for everyone to see. I wanted no one to be able to say afterward that I had hidden it, because I have watched small secrets grow in church basements for sixty years, and they never grow smaller by being kept in a drawer. Shame is a heavy thing, but a secret is heavier. I had carried this one for nine days, and I did not intend to carry it for ten.
A bank statement left on a basement table gave one old treasurer the afternoon to bring a young bookkeeper back to her church in Sioux Falls.
I gave my terms in the plainest voice I own. “Kayleigh, you will tell the council everything this afternoon. You will go to the counselor who sees people from the casino, on Tuesdays, at the Lutheran Social Services office, and I will drive you there myself. You will repay the fund as you are able, a little each month, for as long as it takes. In exchange, there will be no police. Pastor and I have talked, and we are agreed. But the books come out of your hands today, and they do not go back.”
Kayleigh put her face in her hands. “I started with twenty dollars,” she whispered. “I thought if I won once I could put it back. Then I had to win again to cover the first time. I could not stop. I sat in my car outside the casino and cried before I went in, every single time.” Pastor Lindgren came around the table and put his arm around her shoulders. One of the church ladies, Mrs. Dahl, who is ninety, passed her a clean handkerchief from her purse without a word.
Then, as I thought she was done, Kayleigh sprang up, snatched the statement from under my palm, and ran for the stairs, perhaps meaning to throw it in the river. She reached the foot of the steps. There stood the two daughters of Mrs. Dahl, carrying trays of sweet rolls, and behind them the pastor, with Mr. Halvorsen and three of the other ladies in a line across the bottom landing, all of them in their Sunday cardigans. No one said a word. The girl hit the wall of church ladies and stopped, quivering, with a tray of cinnamon rolls tilting dangerously over her head.
Mrs. Dahl took the statement out of her hand and passed it back to me hand over hand, like a casserole. The girl slid down the wall and wept. Pastor Lindgren knelt beside her and spoke very softly, and presently she nodded. “I will go Tuesday,” she said. “I will tell my husband tonight.” I came across the basement slowly, with my cane, and gave her my own handkerchief. “Good,” I said. “Then the worst of it is over, and the rest is only work.”
The money consequences were handled by the council. I returned the thirty eight thousand dollars that donors had given for the youth camp, out of my own savings, within the week, so that no child would lose a summer. Kayleigh signed a note to repay the fund over ten years and has not missed a payment. The life insurance of my husband and the sale of the Lars Sorenson hardware stores, five million, two hundred thousand dollars in all, I placed in a trust, with Mr. Halvorsen as co trustee, and with two signatures on every check.
In the name of my husband Lars, who passed in 2017, I started the Lars Sorenson Fund. It pays for gambling counseling, financial literacy classes for church treasurers and camp scholarships, in Minnehaha, Lincoln and Turner counties. In the first year we trained forty one volunteer treasurers and sent fifty two children to summer camp. One was a deacon in Canton who had been quietly borrowing from the offering plate, and who came to us before anyone found out.
On a Sunday in June, I stood at the back of the sanctuary and watched the children file in from camp, brown and sunburned, singing the songs they had learned. In the third pew sat Kayleigh with her husband and her baby, her eyes clear. When the plate came around, she put in a folded bill, and the usher looked at me, and I nodded. The count was done that afternoon by two people, as always, at the same folding table in the same basement, with the same coffee urn gurgling in the corner. It came out to the penny. Pastor Lindgren shook my hand afterward and said the Lord keeps good books, and I told him that he had better, since the rest of us are clearly not to be trusted without help.