The green ledger had a cardboard cover that was curling at the corners where my thumbs had held it every Sunday night for forty-two years. My mother gave it to me when Dale and I bought the house on Maple Street, and she licked the lead of her yellow pencil before she showed me how to rule the columns. Red for what went out, blue for what came in, and a black line drawn square across the bottom so the pennies never wandered off.

Dale passed away in the back bedroom when the maples were turning that rusty brown color in October. He left behind a small collection of iron woodworking planes, four shirts that still smelled faintly of WD-40, and thirty-four thousand dollars in a savings account at the county credit union.

Mr. Easton came to the funeral in a dark gray suit that didn’t look like it had ever seen a weed patch or a grease stain. He shook my hand outside the vestry door and told me Dale was one of the honest ones. Two weeks later he was sitting at my kitchen table with a black leather portfolio open between the sugar bowl and the salt shaker.

“Lillian,” he said, using that soft church voice people reserve for widows and dogs with bad hips. “You don’t want that money sitting in a low-interest drawer losing ground to the grocery truck. Let me put it into the parish stabilization fund. Safe municipal bonds. Steady quarterly returns.”

I didn’t know a municipal bond from a sack of seed corn. But Mr. Easton was the treasurer for the First Baptist trustees, and my sister Martha always said his father kept books for the grain elevator during the depression without missing a nickel.

“Just six hundred a month,” he told me, sliding a green application form across the oilcloth. “You won’t even miss it out of the social security check, and by the time you need a new roof, you’ll be sitting pretty.”

I started the habit on the first Tuesday of November. Every month I walked down to the basement of the parish hall where they kept the district offices behind frosted glass. Mr. Easton always had a fresh cup of instant coffee on his blotter and a calendar with pictures of draft horses.

He would take my check, tear off a yellow receipt with a little jagged edge, and slide it across the desk without looking up from his ledger. “Another brick in the wall, Lillian,” he would say. His sleeves were always rolled up twice, showing gray hairs on forearms that stayed pale even in July.

For four years I didn’t think much about the totals. The quarterly statements arrived like clockwork in long white envelopes with a blue return stamp in the corner. They showed the principal climbing from thirty-four thousand to forty-two, then fifty-one, and finally fifty-eight thousand dollars by the end of last September.

I didn’t talk to Martha about it because Martha had her own troubles with her hips and her daughter’s divorce in Peoria. Dale always said money is like a hog in a lane; you only need to know it’s moving forward, not where it’s sleeping.

Then came the night the furnace started making that hollow banging sound like someone hitting a galvanized tub with a wooden mallet. I sat up in bed at two in the morning, listening to the pipes shiver against the lath and plaster, and I wondered what the roof repairs would run if the whole south slope gave way before winter.

I got out of bed, pulled my flannel robe over my shoulders, and walked down the cold hallway to the sideboard where the green ledger lived under a stack of old seed catalogs. The kitchen was dark except for the amber light of the microwave clock blinking twelve-twelve after a power flicker earlier that evening.

I didn’t make tea. I didn’t check the pilot light. I just sat down at the table and opened the book to the back page where I kept the running tally of every check I wrote to Mr. Easton since Dale died.

The first column was the date. The second was the check number from the little blue book in my purse. The third was the amount, always six hundred dollars, right down to the double zero.

I ran my index finger down the column. I didn’t use a ruler because I knew where the lines were by heart. I added the first twelve months. Then I added the second year. Then the third. Then the twelve checks from the fourth year that had just ended in September.

The sum didn’t look right at the bottom of the page. So I took a fresh piece of yellow scratch paper and did it again. Then I turned the ledger upside down and started from the bottom up, the way my mother taught me when our county grain store had a discrepancy in the audit back in sixty-four.

The total at the bottom of my green ledger was seventy-four thousand two hundred dollars.

Mr. Easton’s latest statement, folded neatly inside the back pocket of the cover, said I had fifty-eight thousand dollars in the municipal stabilization fund.

I sat there while the microwave clock changed to twelve-thirteen. The house was quiet except for the refrigerator kicking on with a low, flat shudder. I didn’t cry. I just kept looking at the difference between seventy-four thousand and fifty-eight thousand, which came out to sixteen thousand two hundred dollars that had vanished somewhere between my kitchen table and the parish hall.

The furnace banged once more in the basement, then settled down into a dull, hot hum. I closed the green ledger, slipped the elastic band around the cardboard covers, and put it back under the seed catalogs.

The next morning the gravel in the drive crunched under my tires when I backed the Buick out of the shed at eight-fifteen. The sky was the color of a wet slate shingle, and the wind was coming off the river with that sharp, raw edge that makes your eyes water before you even reach the blacktop.

I didn’t call Martha. I didn’t stop for bread at the corner store. I drove straight down to the parish hall and parked right beside the white Ford pickup with the drainage company sign on the door.

The hallway inside smelled like damp floor wax and old hymn books. The door to Mr. Easton’s office was half open, and I could see the blue sleeve of his shirt moving across the blotter as he signed some papers with a fountain pen.

I didn’t knock. I just pushed the oak door the rest of the way open and stepped onto the gray carpet.

Mr. Easton looked up over his wire-rimmed glasses. He didn’t look surprised to see me, just a little put out, the way a man is when someone interrupts him before he gets to the crossword puzzle in the morning paper.

“Lillian,” he said, laying his pen down in the groove of the wooden holder. “You’re early for your November deposit. The books don’t close until Friday.”

I didn’t sit down in the green vinyl chair across from him. I laid the green ledger flat on his blotter right over top of his papers, right where the calendar with the draft horses was open to November.

The cardboard cover hit the mahogany with a dry, heavy sound that made him blink once.

Mr. Easton smiled. It was that same slow, church-supper smile he wore at the cemetery when they lowered Dale into the gravel. “These things get complicated, dear,” he said, leaning back and folding his hands over his stomach. “Let’s not get our feathers ruffled over a clerical delay.”

I reached down with one finger and tapped the corner of the ledger where my mother’s pencil marks had turned gray and shiny from forty years of being touched.

“Then explain this line,” I said. My voice didn’t shake. It sounded thin and dry, like old corn husks rattling against a fence post in January. “The one where I gave you six hundred dollars every month for forty-eight months, and your paper says I’m sixteen thousand dollars short of where I started.”

Mr. Easton didn’t look at the ledger. He looked at my fingers.

“The market has its dips, Lillian,” he said, and his voice didn’t have that Sunday parish ring to it anymore. It sounded flat, like someone reading a notice off the courthouse door. “Bonds aren’t a savings account. Sometimes the yield adjusts downward to cover administrative overhead.”

I didn’t move my hand off the book.

“Dale never mentioned overhead,” I said. “And the county register at the courthouse told me yesterday morning that the parish stabilization fund hasn’t held a municipal bond since the Eisenhower administration.”

The room got very quiet then. The only sound was the radiator under the frosted window hissing as the steam finally reached the second floor.

Mr. Easton took off his wire-rimmed glasses and laid them on the blotter beside my mother’s ledger. Without them, his eyes looked small and watery, like two gray buttons dropped in milk.

“Lillian,” he said softly, and this time he didn’t call me dear. “Let’s talk about this in the vestry. We can work out an adjustment.”

“There isn’t any adjustment,” I said, and I picked the ledger up off his desk, feeling the familiar curl of the cardboard under my thumb. “I’m leaving this with Sheriff Miller on my way to the grocery store. He likes numbers even better than I do.”

I turned around before he could answer, and the only thing I heard as I pulled the heavy oak door shut behind me was the dry, flat click of his fountain pen rolling off the blotter and hitting the floor.