Part 3 — The Livewell
Miss Ardith lifted her face toward Wendell, as calmly as if she were announcing the next hymn.
“You told Ilene you put it in the livewell of that boat, Wendell. In a bread bag, under the lid, where the water goes. Because no one checks the fish tank on a boat that has never touched a lake.”
A gasp ran down the pews like a wave. Ilene put her purse on the floor.
The pastor walked down the center aisle. Deacon Amos was already in the parking lot, with two of the ushers and a screwdriver. I followed behind with Miss Ardith on my arm.
The bass boat sat on its trailer in the church lot, glittering in the Easter sun. The livewell lid was in the back, under the casting deck. Amos pried it open with a flathead and reached inside.
The bread bag was there. It was knotted at the top and damp at the corners, and when he opened it on the trailer fender, he counted slowly in front of everyone.
Eleven thousand, nine hundred dollars in fifties.
Wendell had said that nobody saw it, and the one person he had forgotten was the woman whose ears had outlasted her eyes by thirty years.
Wendell stood in the lot with his hands hanging at his sides. He no longer called me confused. He said, in a very small voice, that he had been ashamed to ask for the money and more ashamed to give it back.
Ilene took her husbands hand. She told him, in front of the congregation, that she would not live with a lie.
Missouri law treats a spoken loan as a loan when it can be proven, and a witness who heard it is proof. The pastor did not need a court. He asked Wendell if he would make it right.
Wendell sold the bass boat on Monday for twenty-nine thousand dollars. He paid me the twenty-eight thousand and the interest on top of it, in a cashiers check delivered to my porch. The eleven thousand nine hundred from the livewell went to the benevolence fund for Ilenes hip, which had been the reason for the borrowing.
The pastor asked him to stand at the lectern the following Sunday. Wendell told the congregation exactly what he had done, and what he had said about my mind. When he sat down, no one clapped, and no one left.
After the service I carried a slice of pecan pie to Miss Ardith in the fellowship hall.
She ate it with her fingers and told me, in the most loving way, that I had put in too much vanilla. June always did.