He Stole From My Wife’s Scholarship and Blamed Me at the Fish Fry

Every Saturday morning I still have coffee with the man who has been stealing from my dead wife’s scholarship fund. He has no idea the bank called me back in March. “You holding up okay, Hoss?” he asks me every single week, and puts his hand on my shoulder when he says it. I tell him I’m getting there, and I let him pay for the pie.

His name is Dale Prentiss. We met in a lumberyard in nineteen sixty-eight. He was best man at my wedding and I was best man at both of his.

My wife was Marlene. She taught fourth grade at Wilder Elementary for thirty-four years, and when she passed, this town did something I still can’t talk about without my throat closing. They raised money. Bake sales. A golf scramble. A jar by the register at the hardware store with her picture taped to it. Old students sent checks from three states away.

It became the Marlene Beckett Memorial Scholarship. One graduating senior every spring who’s going into teaching.

I couldn’t do it myself that first year. I could not sit in a room and count money with her face on the jar. So Dale came to my house one evening, sat on the porch with me, and said, “Hoss, let me carry this one for you.”

The Legion made him treasurer. I signed the card that gave him access. Best thing a friend ever offered me.

I believed that for two years.

In March, the bank called about a card that was never activated. A young woman named Priya walked me through it on the phone, and because my name is still on the account as founder, she could read me the balance.

It was wrong. Not a little wrong. We’d put in over nine thousand after the golf scramble alone, and I had never taken a dime out. What she read me was under half of what should have been sitting there.

“Are you sure that’s current?” I asked her.

“Yes sir. Would you like me to mail you the full statements?”

I said yes. She said it would take a week.

I want to tell you about that week.

I did not drive to Dale’s house. I did not call my son. I sat in Marlene’s chair in the front room, which I have not moved and do not intend to, and I did the thing she always told me to do when I got hot. Nothing. Marlene used to say that the first thing out of a man’s mouth is almost never the thing he’d wish he’d said.

So I sat there. I drank my coffee in the morning and I watched the street and I waited.

The statements came on a Thursday. I spread them on the kitchen table. Cash withdrawals. Two, three hundred at a time. Never the same day of the month, which is the kind of thing a person does when they know what they’re doing looks wrong.

And then in November, one withdrawal for eighteen hundred dollars. Four days before Dale and Cheryl went to Branson for their anniversary. They sent me a postcard from there. It’s still on my refrigerator.

I’ll be honest with you. What I felt first was not anger. It was embarrassment. Fifty-eight years and I never once thought to look.

Saturday came around again. Dale was already at the counter when I walked in.

“Hoss! You look rough, buddy. You sleeping?”

“Not great,” I said. Which was true.

“You gotta get out more. Marlene would’ve wanted that.”

I let him say her name. I let him buy the pie. I sat across from him and watched him eat and I did not say a word about what was in the envelope at home. Not because I’m some kind of patient man. Because I didn’t trust what would come out of my mouth, and Marlene was right about that.

Then the Legion put the fish fry on the calendar. Second Saturday in June, same as always. And on the flyer it said the scholarship would be awarded that night.

So I went. I put on the blue shirt Marlene bought me at Penney’s before she got sick. I drove over early and I sat at a table down front with my hands folded and I did not say one word to anybody about why I was there.

Dale got up with the microphone. He’s good with a room, always has been. He could sell water to a drowning man, that’s what Marlene used to say, and she said it fondly because she loved him too.

He talked about Marlene for a while, and he did it well. Half that hall was crying. A woman three tables back who’d had Marlene in nineteen eighty-two was wiping her face with a napkin.

Then he said the fund had gotten “a little thin” this year.

He said, and I want to get this right because I have thought about it every night since: “Some of that’s on me for not chasing folks harder. And some of it, well. Hoss hasn’t been himself. There’s been some paperwork confusion on the family’s end.”

There it was. In front of two hundred people who have known me since I was a young man, he set it on my doorstep. Gentle as anything, the way you’d set down a sleeping baby. He made me the reason the fund was short.

A woman at my table patted my arm. I could feel the sympathy coming off the room, aimed at me, the grieving widower who couldn’t keep his paperwork straight.

I still didn’t say anything. I let him go. Because Dale was rolling now, and a man who is rolling says more than he means to.

He explained about the withdrawals. Said they were reimbursements for scholarship expenses. Printing. Postage. “Administrative costs.” He waved his hand the way you do when something is too boring to get into.

Then he made his mistake.

“Every one of those has a receipt,” he said. “Cheryl’s got the folder in the truck.”

The hall clapped for him.

And Cheryl Prentiss, sitting two tables over from me, went absolutely still.

Because Cheryl and I have been on the Legion auxiliary together for eleven years. Cheryl is the one who actually does the printing at the copy shop on Third Street. She does it for free. She has always done it for free. And Cheryl knows exactly what that folder has got in it and what it hasn’t.

I watched her look at the back of her husband’s head.

Then I stood up. Seventy-one years old, bad knee, blue shirt, and every face in that hall turned around.

“Dale,” I said, “I’d like to see that folder.”

He laughed. Big Dale laugh, the one that fills a room. “Sure thing, Hoss. After the dessert auction, I’ll grab it.”

“No,” I said. “Now would be better.”

The room got quiet. Not gradually. All at once.

“Because Priya at the bank sent me the statements in March,” I said. “Every page. And there’s a withdrawal from November, eighteen hundred dollars, four days before you and Cheryl went to Branson, and I would like you to explain that to this room before you say one more word about my wife.”

Dale didn’t move for a long time. His hand was still on the microphone and his mouth was open slightly, the way it gets when he’s thinking fast. I’ve seen that look a thousand times over poker.

“Hoss,” he said. “Come on, let’s talk about this outside.”

“We’re talking about it here.”

Cheryl stood up then. She didn’t look at me. She looked at Dale and she said, “There’s no folder in the truck, Dale.”

That was when the room understood. You could feel it shift. The sympathy that had been pointed at me a minute ago swung around like a weather vane.

Dale set the microphone down on the table. He put both hands flat on the tablecloth and he looked at me, and for just a second I saw something in his face I’d never seen before in fifty-eight years. Not shame, exactly. Recognition. That it was over and he knew it.

“I was going to put it back,” he said. Quiet enough that only the front few tables heard.

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have anything left to say to Dale Prentiss. I picked up the envelope I’d brought with me, the one with all of Priya’s statements inside, and I walked it to the head table where the Legion commander was sitting with his mouth hanging open, and I set it down in front of him.

“That’s everything,” I told him. “I’d like someone else to manage the fund from here on.”

I drove home. I sat in Marlene’s chair. I did not feel triumphant. I felt like I’d just put down a dog I’d had for fifty-eight years.

The Legion removed Dale as treasurer that week. They asked me if I wanted to press charges. My son drove up from Springfield and sat at my kitchen table and said, “Dad, you have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” I told him.

“He stole from Mom.”

I know he did. I know exactly what Dale stole and who it belonged to. But I also know Marlene, and Marlene would have wanted the fund to keep going more than she’d have wanted Dale Prentiss in a courtroom.

So here’s what happened. The Legion is pursuing it through their own channels. Dale is no longer a member. The fund got replenished by donations that came in after word spread, because this town loved Marlene and they proved it again. A young woman named Kelsey Walker got the scholarship in July. She’s starting at the state college in the fall, education major.

I don’t have Saturday coffee with Dale anymore. He hasn’t called. Cheryl called me once, about two weeks after the fish fry. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t know the full extent until that night.

“I believe you,” I told her. And I do.

I still sit in Marlene’s chair most mornings. I still haven’t moved it. Some days I talk to her about it, out loud, which I know sounds like an old man losing his grip. But she was the one who told me to wait, in her way. She was the one who said the first thing out of a man’s mouth is almost never right. She was right about everything except trusting Dale Prentiss, and I made that same mistake right alongside her, so I can’t hold that against anybody.

The scholarship is intact. That’s what matters. Her name is still on it, and it still does what she would have wanted it to do.