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mental math.
    “Not at all really. It’s a small dent that I have turned toward a wall. No need to replace it.”
    “And the communion vessels must cost something.”
    “We have volunteers who are happy to fix these things.”
    I quickly filled out the check where I stood. “Will fifty dollars cover it, or is it more like seventy or eighty?”
    He sighed heavily. “Fifty dollars will more than settle any damages we were done.”
    I wrote in the amount, tore the check out, and tried to hand it to him. He shook his head. “I really can’t take that from you. We wouldn’t have gone after him for damages. He’s not well, Keziah. We wouldn’t sue a sick man for something he couldn’t help. No one was hurt. Your money is not necessary.”
    “It is necessary to me. I would think you, of all people, would understand about having a clear conscience. This is the only way he will let me help him, and he would forbid even this if he knew. He does not demand this of me, I demand it of myself. Take it as a donation if it makes you feel better, but you must take it. I’ll have someone slip it into the plate next week, or mail it in anonymously if you don’t take it now.”
    Slowly, as if giving me plenty of time to draw it back, he took the check from my outstretched hand. Once he had the check he folded it neatly and stuck it in his breast pocket.
    “Thank you for understanding,” I said.
    “You are welcome, my dear.”
    “I should go now. Thank you for your time.”
    “It’s been lovely to meet you, Keziah.”
    He shook my hand again, and then watched me go with sad, and oddly teary eyes. I did not wonder about it at the time. After all, he was a priest. And what did I know of priests?

Five
    I did not arrive back at the jail before Porter finished speaking with my father.
    “You should have waited for the Elder’s permission,” said Porter, by way of greeting, when I entered the station lobby.
    “Did he grant it?”
    “Of course not,” said Porter.
    “Seems like it would have been an awful long wait, then,” I said. Behind his computer screen Officer Cortland snorted. Susan was studying the floor very hard. Apparently, she had been reprimanded for letting me leave, or possibly for bringing me here in the first place.
    Porter gave me a hard look that I’m sure was intended to quash my spirit. It didn’t work. I smiled at Porter, and turned to Cortland. “Is there a good motel in town?”
    That Sunday night I blew the dust off my credit card, and sprang for two rooms at the Dresden Inn. A decent-enough place on the outskirts of town, which cost me one hundred and five dollars, and thirty-two cents. Then we went out to eat at the nearest sit-down restaurant, a place called
Parkers
which officer Cortland recommended. It was pretty good for a greasy spoon. When the bill came, Porter looked at me steadily with his huge, soggy-blue eyes, and didn’t even offer to pay his part of the thirty-three dollars and sixteen cents. I tried to resent it, but who was I kidding? I knew, if they had any money on them at all, it belonged to the church. They surely were not going to spend it on the likes of me. Looked at the right way, I was feeding the poor, and sheltering the homeless. It was a very decent and Christian thing of me to do. Noble even. I was not, however, in the mood to look at it the right way.
    One of the many hard lessons I had learned in my life was about money and saving. I never learned anything from my father about keeping or managing money. There never was any at our house to manage, so in many ways there was nothing there to learn. The house we lived in was one my parents had purchased outright when they moved. My father must have somehow scraped together the funds for taxes, electricity, and water. Heat was from an old wood-burning stove one of the members put in for us. Cooling in the summer was opening some windows and praying for a breeze. Food bills were supplemented by donations from the