“We can’t just invent six thousand dollars out of thin air, Martha,” Pastor Thomas said, rubbing his temples as he looked at the empty metal lockbox on my desk.

I sat back in my vinyl office chair, the damp cold of the church basement seeping through my sweater.

I’ve been the secretary at Grace Methodist for twenty-three years, and I know our books inside and out. We didn’t have the money.

Our church burial fund was a quiet miracle that had run for over two decades. Whenever a member passed away and the family couldn’t cover the costs, the fund stepped in. No questions asked. No paperwork.

Every single donation to that fund had come the exact same way. On the first Monday of the month, a plain white envelope would be slid under my office door. No name. No note. Just crisp hundred-dollar bills.

In 2004, the fund covered its very first funeral: sixty-two hundred dollars for Sister Davis when her husband passed from lung cancer. Over twenty years, those white envelopes had covered seventeen funerals. Seventeen families spared from the cold, clinical reality of a county cremation.

In total, the anonymous donor had given one hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars.

But last month, the envelopes stopped. For the first time in twenty-three years, my desk stayed bare on the first Monday. I didn’t think much of it at first. People get busy, or they travel.

Then, a week later, Gerald Harper’s heart gave out.

Gerald was a quiet man who always sat in the very last pew of the sanctuary. He never had much to say to anyone. He ushered on Easter and Christmas, mostly because he was tall and could reach the high coat racks. He was a retired machinist from the local pump plant.

He drove an old Buick LeSabre with rust eating the bottom of the doors. He wore the same charcoal-grey cardigan to service for fifteen winters. He was, by all accounts, a man who lived on the absolute margins of his pension.

Now, his widow, Clara, had nothing. I had checked her church record, and her savings account had barely forty dollars left after the medical bills from Gerald’s final week.

“The church board just cannot take on this debt, Martha,” Pastor Thomas continued, his voice soft but firm. He was a young man, only three years out of seminary, and he looked at the church like a business that needed to balance. “We have to suggest a county-assisted cremation to Clara. It’s the only practical option.”

I felt a sick, heavy feeling in my stomach. I actually defended the board’s rules in my own head for a second, and that is the part I am ashamed of now. I wanted things to be simple.

“She’s been coming here fifty years, Thomas,” I said, my voice cracking slightly. “We can’t just throw her husband in an unmarked plot.”