Dale drove us home in the dark.
We live four miles out of Belden on a gravel road, in the farmhouse Dale’s grandfather built in 1922. We farmed three hundred and twenty acres of corn and beans for thirty-eight years. Now Dale rents most of it out to the Hoffman boys and keeps forty acres and a few beef cows, because his knees aren’t what they were.
He drove his old Silverado with the window cracked, the way he always does, even in October. The headlights swept across the ditches. The fields on both sides were stubble now, gray and flat under a half moon.
He didn’t say anything for the first two miles. Neither did I.
Then, just past the Mueller place, he cleared his throat.
“You going to say something,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Say what,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. He reached over and turned down the radio, which was already off.
“That I think she pulled her own girl’s name?” I said.
There it was. Out loud. In the cab of the truck, in the dark.
Dale didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the road.
“She didn’t shake it,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“Ruth always shook it. Every year. Like she was mixing paint.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for another half mile. Rhonda is his little sister. Six years younger. He taught her to ride a bike and drove her to her prom and walked her down the aisle when their father was too sick to do it.
“Pastor Dahl could ask her,” Dale said finally. “Quiet. Just ask her.”
“And then what,” I said.
I’d been thinking about it since the moment she said “Katie.” I’d been thinking about it while I washed forty coffee cups in the church kitchen.
“She cries,” I said. “Katie cries. Rhonda says how dare anybody accuse her, after eleven years running that raffle for free. She says she’s never been so hurt in her life.”
Dale didn’t say anything. He knew his sister.
“And half the church takes her side,” I said. “Because she’s done the funeral lunches for twenty years. Because she brings scalloped corn to every potluck. Because she cried.”
“And the other half,” Dale said.
“Takes mine. Because I made the quilt. Because Edna Stoltz saw it too. Because a lot of people have been waiting a long time to say something about Rhonda.”
I looked out the window at the dark fields.
“And come Easter,” I said, “we have two churches in one building. Sitting on opposite sides. Not talking at coffee hour. Arguing at council meetings about the furnace. Over a quilt.”
We’d seen it happen before. In 1997, Grace Lutheran almost split over whether to put carpet in the sanctuary. The Heinrichs and the Volkmanns didn’t speak to each other for six years. Three families left for the Methodist church in Denver.
Over carpet.
“I can’t prove she rigged it,” I said. “And I won’t split the church over a quilt.”
Dale nodded slowly.
“So you’re going to say nothing.”
“I’m going to say nothing.”
He reached across the bench seat and put his big rough hand over mine. He held it the rest of the way home.
For a week I scrubbed things already clean.
That’s what I do when something sits wrong in me. My mother did it too. I scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I took every plate out of the cupboard and washed it and put it back. I cleaned the oven. I washed the windows inside and out, even though it was forty degrees and the wind was blowing.
Dale came in from the barn on Wednesday and found me on a ladder, scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
“Joan,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Nobody’s been up there since 1985.”
“Then it needed it.”
He stood there in his barn coat looking at me for a long time. Then he went back out.
It wasn’t the quilt. Not really.
I mean, it was. Four months of my evenings, hanging on Katie Pfeiffer’s bed. I won’t pretend that didn’t sting.
But it wasn’t the cheating either. Rhonda’s been bending little rules her whole life. Taking the biggest piece of pie. Cutting in line at the pancake breakfast. Getting her picture in the paper for the food drive even though Edna did all the work.
That wasn’t what kept me up at night.
What kept me up at night was Pearl.
Chapter Three: Sixty Dollars in Quarters
Pearl Wendt is eighty-one.
She lost her husband, Vern, in a bean field nine years ago. He was walking beans on a hot July afternoon, pulling volunteer corn out of the rows by hand, the way the old-timers still did. He was seventy-five. His heart gave out somewhere around the middle of the field.
Pearl found him at suppertime when he didn’t come in. She walked out to look for him in her house shoes.
She said later he was lying on his back between the rows, looking up at the sky, like he’d just decided to take a rest. His seed corn cap was still on his head.
They’d rented their farm. They’d never owned land. When Vern died, the landlord’s son rented the ground to somebody else, and the farmhouse went with it.
So Pearl moved to town. Into half a house on Third Street. A little white duplex near the grain elevator, built in the forties, with a sagging porch and a storm door that didn’t latch. She rented the east half. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month, from a man in Cedar Falls she’d never met.
She lived on Vern’s Social Security. Nine hundred and twelve dollars a month. That’s it. No pension. No savings to speak of. They’d spent everything they had on Vern’s bypass surgery in 2009.
I didn’t know Pearl well before that October. I knew her the way you know people at church. She sat in the back row on the left, in the same spot every Sunday. She wore the same navy blue coat every winter. She always brought a pan of bars to the potluck. Plain ones. Oatmeal or peanut butter. Never anything fancy.
She was quiet. She didn’t serve on committees. She didn’t sing loud. She came early and left late and smiled at everybody.
Then, at the fall supper, I saw her buy raffle tickets.
It was before the meal, at the card table by the door where Rhonda was selling them. I was carrying a tray of coffee cups past, and I stopped, because Pearl was counting out money.
In quarters.
She had them in a little cloth coin purse. She was taking them out and stacking them on the card table. In fours. One dollar. One dollar. One dollar. Little silver towers, in a neat row, like she’d been practicing.
She stacked up sixty dollars.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
