Part 3 — The Parish Treasurer
The treasurer was Marcia Dudek. She sat in the front row with the cash box in her lap, a woman of fifty-eight in a cranberry sweater, who had counted the Sunday collection at St. Hedwig for twenty-two years and who had once driven me to the hospital when Stan died. She did not look surprised. She looked like a person who has been waiting for a telephone to ring for three months and is relieved when it finally does.
Paula Brandt did not accuse her. She said, in a calm voice, “Mrs. Dudek, the deposits came from the building fund account in eight transfers, each one approved by you. I would like to hear, in your words, why.” Marcia stood. She put the cash box on the folding chair behind her. “Jared coached my son at Wilson Park for six years,” she said. “When my husband passed, he was the only one who called. He showed me a way to make the fund grow. A system. He said it could not lose.”
The hall had gone so quiet that I could hear the refrigerator in the kitchen. Marcia went on, to the floor and to nobody. “He said he would double the money by Christmas, and that I could put it all back before the audit, and nobody would ever know. The first week it went up. The second week it went up. Then it went down. I kept thinking the next week would fix it.” She looked at me. “Roz, I knew it was your account. He told me you had given permission. He said you were proud of him.”
I had expected to be angry. What I felt was closer to the feeling I get at the end of a long route, when the last box is delivered and the satchel is light. I said, “Marcia, he told us both the same lie.” She began to cry. Father Kowalczyk came down from the stage and put his arm around her shoulders in front of three hundred of his parishioners, and she let him. It is hard to describe how much that cost him and how freely he gave it.
Jared was still on the stage with the drum in his hands. He had not moved. He opened his mouth to say something, and the microphone, still switched on, carried the first breath of it across the hall: “Mom, I—” and then, because he heard his own voice, he stopped. The woman from the credit union said, “Mr. Teague, you may put the drum down.” He put it down, very carefully, as if it might break. Two officers came in through the side door.
He was charged with identity theft, fraud against a financial institution and theft from a charitable organization, the last of which was added by the state when the parish records were reviewed. He pleaded guilty before the end of the year. The judge was a woman who had a brother with the same affliction, and she spoke to him for a long time. She sentenced him to a term in prison, probation after it, repayment of every dollar, and a treatment program he would attend whether he liked it or not.
The credit union restored my savings in full, on the strength of the report that Paula Brandt wrote. The $31,600 came back, with interest, and the online betting company, after a letter from the state attorney general, closed the account and refunded what remained of it. The company was fined as well. Paula told me that the betting account had been opened under my Social Security number with an image of my driver license that had been altered, and that the law is quite clear about whose fault that is.
Marcia resigned as treasurer that night. She repaid the fund from her own savings and the sale of a lake lot her husband had left her, and she pleaded to a lesser charge, since the parish asked the court for leniency. She received probation and a year of service at the food pantry. Father Kowalczyk said from the pulpit, on the Sunday after, that a community is measured by what it does with its sinners, and that he intended to keep this one.
My sister Maxine came to my house that afternoon, as I had known she would. She stood on the porch with her hat in her hand, and I let her stand there a moment before I opened the screen. “Roz, I told you to stop fighting him.” “You did.” “I am very sorry.” “I know.” We sat on the swing, and she told me about the nights she lay awake. I told her about the library, the courtesy phone and the gallon freezer bag. She laughed in spite of herself. “You always did keep everything,” she said.
The quilt was drawn that same evening, after the hall had calmed. Father Kowalczyk asked me to reach into the drum. I put my hand in among the little paper tickets, closed my eyes, and pulled one out. The number was read aloud. A hand went up at the back of the hall. It belonged to old Mrs. Lisowski, who came forward on her walker, looked at the quilt, looked at me, and folded it into my arms. “This belongs on the bed of Roz,” she said, and the whole hall applauded.
A quilt is a promise stitched in the dark by someone who will not be there to see it kept. I put it on my bed that night, and I slept under it, and it smelled of cedar and pierogi and my mother.
In the spring, after a long winter, I took the bus to the prison in Toledo on the first visiting Saturday. Jared sat across a table from me in a gray shirt, thinner, with his hands flat on the surface. He said, “Mom, how are you?” It was the first time in two years he had asked and waited for the answer. I told him about the garden and the quilt and the parish festival. He listened. Then he said, “I would like to learn how to sew.” I said I would bring the needles.