I had the invoices spread all over my kitchen table at one in the morning, and I kept lining them up over and over hoping they’d start saying something different. They didn’t. Same company. Same neat little signature in the corner.

Roof. Plumbing. Electrical. Over and over for three years. And I sat there in my robe thinking, I’m going to have to be the one who says this out loud, aren’t I.

Let me back up, because you need to know I loved that church. First Baptist out on the county road, forty-some members on a good Sunday. Pastor Coleman married my daughter. He sat in the hospital with me the night my Dale passed and he didn’t say a single dumb thing, he just held my hand. So when they asked me to take over the books after old Eunice’s eyes went bad, I said yes because I wanted to give back. That’s the truth. I wanted to be useful to the place that carried me.

The books were a mess when I got them. Eunice did everything by hand and half of it was in pencil. So I’m going through, trying to clean it up, and I keep seeing the same vendor. Coleman Home Repair. Travis Coleman, the pastor’s boy. He’s got a little handyman business, or he’s supposed to. And the amounts were not small. A new roof. A whole plumbing job in the fellowship hall. Electrical work. I thought, well, good, at least somebody finally fixed the place.

Except here’s the thing. The roof still leaks. It leaks right over the third pew on the left, you have to put a bucket out when it rains hard, everybody knows to skip that seat. The pipes in the fellowship hall freeze every single January and we lug in those big jugs of water.

And I happen to know the electrical panel hasn’t been touched since 1997 because the date’s written right on it in marker. So I’m holding an invoice that says we paid to have all of that done, and I’m looking at a building where none of it got done.

I told myself I was confused. Bookkeeping was new to me, maybe I was reading it wrong. So I did the dumbest, most careful thing, I matched every invoice to the county building inspection reports. Every permit. Every date. And there was nothing. No permits pulled. No inspections. On the dates Travis billed us for being up on that roof, there’s no record he was ever there at all. Because he wasn’t. He billed, and Pastor Coleman approved it, and the money went out the door, and nobody fixed a thing.