“I need five minutes at the end of the service,” I told Pastor Gary on Thursday. He looked at me the way he does, that patient look, and said of course, of course, whatever I need.

He doesn’t know what I’m planning to say. Nobody does. My son Marcus is driving in from Portland tonight and I haven’t told him either. I keep picking up my phone and putting it back down. I’ve written the first sentence of a text to him about eleven times this week and deleted every single one.

It was 1986. March, I think. Or maybe early April. The mill had laid Dennis off right around his birthday, which was March 14th, so I know it was somewhere in there. I remember because I’d already bought him a cake from the Kroger bakery and I felt stupid about the candles. We had two kids at home, a mortgage on a house that needed a new roof, and an electric bill that was sitting on the kitchen counter with a disconnect notice stapled to it. I kept flipping it face-down so I didn’t have to look at the red lettering.

I was the counting secretary for the congregation that year. That’s the person who stays after the main service with one or two deacons and counts the offering. Tallies it up, writes it in the ledger, prepares the deposit. I’d been doing it for three years. It was just what I did on Sunday afternoons while Dennis took the kids to his mother’s. I was trusted with it. That word matters. Trusted.

I don’t actually remember making the decision. That sounds like an excuse and I know it sounds like an excuse. But I genuinely don’t have a memory of sitting there thinking, I’m going to take some of this.

What I remember is the disconnect notice on the counter. I remember stacking the bills into the deposit envelope. And then I remember sitting in my car in the church parking lot with four hundred dollars in my coat pocket. There was a gap somewhere in there that I’ve never been able to fill in, even after all these years of trying.

Four hundred dollars in 1986 was not nothing. It was actually a pretty solid week for that congregation. I told myself I’d put it back before anyone noticed the ledger was light. I told myself it was a loan, not a theft. People tell themselves all kinds of things.