The endorsement on the back of the check was Pastor Reeds.
The food bank director read it very quietly, as though he was sorry to be the one. The check was made out to Broadway Community Pantry, Inc. It was endorsed with the pastors personal signature, and deposited into the churchs general operating account the same afternoon.
Nadia had said the pantry was the churchs. Pastor Reed had told the church board the same. He had signed the check over in good faith, believing what his wife told him, and he had not looked at the name on the front of it.
When the director said his name, the pastor was standing in the back by the coffee urn in his clerical collar. He did not defend himself. He closed his eyes for a long moment and then he said, in front of forty volunteers and a television camera, I did that. I did not read it.
Nadia started to say something, and he put his hand on her arm. It was the first time I had ever seen him do that.
I walked to the front, because I did not like seeing a man stand alone in a church. I said, Pastor, where is the money now? He said it was in the building fund. A part of it had paid for the photo wall and the new sign. The rest was in the account. All of it could be returned.
The director said that the food bank would not pursue the matter if the money was returned within the week and the pantrys agreement was restored. He said it kindly. He did not want to lose a pantry, and he did not want to hurt a church.
Twenty years of Tuesday and Friday mornings, and a stranger with a pair of gold scissors had almost decided that I was a woman who took food home.
The church board met on Wednesday. I was invited, which had not happened in fourteen months. They voted unanimously to return the fourteen thousand dollars, to remove the sign on the door, and to restore my keys. A deacon named Mr. Pettigrew read the motion out loud. He had been one of the four hundred people who turned around in their pews. He said, Betty, we owe you more than a vote.
I told him that a vote was a start.
The denomination sent a district superintendent in June. The pastor and his wife were not removed. They were assigned a mentor and a year of counseling, and the board asked them to attend every pantry shift for a month, as volunteers, wearing aprons. Nadia carried cans. She was not good at it at first, but she learned to stack them by date, and on the last Friday of the month, she asked me how I knew which families needed diapers without being told.
I said, You watch who stands in line without a baby. And you listen.
The sign on the door now reads Broadway Community Pantry, Inc., in letters Mr. Pettigrew painted himself. Under it, in small print, is a line that says, Hosted by First Baptist, where the door has been open since 2005.
The TV station ran a story that night. They did not mention the check. They showed the walk-in freezer, and the van with its 190,000 miles, and me, in my good blue dress, handing a bag of bread to a woman I did not know. The woman said thank you. That was all anybody needed to say.