Pastor Ellis called at eight the next morning. His voice had the careful gentleness he used at funerals, and my stomach turned over. I had been awake since four, sitting in my kitchen with the nineteen checks fanned out on the table in front of me, each one bearing my name in a hand that was almost mine. “Nancy,” he said, “I am at the church. I need you to come to the choir room. Something was found last night when the custodian was cleaning. I think you should see it before I say another word.” I put on my good coat, the one I wore to sing at funerals, and I went.
It was a gray morning and the church looked small in it, the white steeple scraped against low cloud. I have sung in that building every Sunday for forty years, and every Wednesday night for rehearsal, and the third pew from the front has the dent of my body in it. I let myself in by the side door. Pastor Ellis was waiting at the top of the stairs, with his hands clasped, and behind him stood my daughter in law Tiffany, our choir director, in a wrinkled sweater, with her eyes red from crying.
“I did it,” she said. She said it before I could ask. “Nancy, I forged your name. All nineteen checks. I wrote them out of the Roland Memorial Fund. Please let me explain before you say anything.” I did not say anything. I could not. Forty years of choir had taught me how to hold a breath, and I held it now. Pastor Ellis opened the door to the choir room and stepped aside, and I walked in. On the long table by the piano stood a rolling cart. On the cart, in neat stacks, were rows and rows of choir robes for children.
Not just robes. There were small music stands, folders, and black shoes in sizes for children, and a box of sheet music still in its wrapping. On the wall, someone had taped a sign in marker. Welcome, Young Voices of Grace Church. I stared at it. Tiffany came to my side and said in a small voice that the Roland Memorial Fund had, for three years, been drained by the church trustee who held the checkbook, a man who believed the choir was too expensive and the budget should go to a new roof. The money for the children had been refused again and again.
The line between a good deed done wrongly and a wrong deed done lovingly is sometimes thinner than any of us wish to admit.
“I asked him four times,” Tiffany said. “I asked for forty robes for children, and he said no. I asked for a keyboard, and he said no. And all the time, there were kids in the neighborhood, kids who had no instruments at home, who came to the door of this room on Wednesdays and asked if they could sing. So I took your name. I used a copy of your checkbook that Roland left in the file. I ordered everything from a supplier in Springfield, a company owned by Faye Granger.” She looked at me. “The woman whose wedding you sang at thirty one years ago.”
I sat down in a folding chair. I remembered that wedding. The roses in the vestibule, the heat of June, Faye in a dress that she had made herself, laughing at the altar. She and I had stayed friends over the years, in the way of two women who send cards at Christmas and meet at funerals. She had given Tiffany a discount, I realized, a very large one, and had never once called to ask why my signature looked a little careful. She had trusted that a woman who loved music would want the children to sing.
“Why did you not come to me?” I asked at last. “I would have given the money myself.” Tiffany twisted her hands. She said she had been afraid, afraid that the fund of Roland was too sacred, and that I would think it dishonored his memory. Roland had loved the church more than anything but me. He had left the money for good works. But she had been afraid I would say no, and she could not bear to hear it. She had been a coward, she said, and a thief, and a daughter who loved me, all at once.
I stood up and walked to the cart. I ran my hand over the folds of a small blue robe. Then I turned to Pastor Ellis and asked how many children had been coming to sing. He said thirty four. Thirty four children, every week, and not a single one had been charged a nickel. I thought about Roland, who had once carried the groceries of a stranger all the way home in the rain. I smiled, and then I could not stop. The laughter came up from my chest like a long hymn note, and Tiffany stared at me as if I had lost my mind.
“Child,” I said, “Roland would have signed every one of those checks himself, if he had known the trustee was blocking him.” I took her face in my hands. I told her what she did was wrong, and that she must make it right with the fund, the church, and the law, but that I had never been so proud of her. Pastor Ellis said he would call the board that evening. I said I would go with her. We would face them together, an old alto and a young director, and we would not back down.
The board met on Thursday. Faye Granger came, too, in a gray suit, with her records in a folder. In the end, the trustee resigned, the checks were ratified as a loan to the choir from the fund, and Tiffany was asked to serve as director of the ministry for children at a fair salary. The next Sunday, thirty four children in blue robes filed into the sanctuary behind a boy carrying a cross. I sat in the third pew and sang along with every note. At the end, a little girl waved at me from the choir loft, and I waved back.