The Stitch

Chapter OneThe Laundry Basket

The Memorial Day parade in Vera Crus took eleven minutes from the fire hall to the cemetery, and Walt Brubaker had timed it every year since 1994.

He did not time it on purpose. He looked at his watch when the first engine pulled out, because that was when you looked at your watch, and he looked at it again when the color guard reached the cemetery gate, because that was the end, and the two numbers sat in his head side by side whether he wanted them or not. Eleven minutes was normal. Twelve meant the high school band had stopped to fix somebody's shoe. Nine had happened once, in 2011, when a thunderstorm came over the ridge and the whole parade broke into a trot.

This year, at the second corner, it stopped altogether.

"Margaret," said Freddie Hollenbach. "Margaret. Leave it."

Margaret was a goat. She was brown and white, about the height of a fire hydrant, with yellow eyes and a beard and the expression of a woman who has been asked to wait in line. Freddie had bought her at a mud sale in March, more or less by accident, and she had gone everywhere with him since, in the back of his truck, to the VFW, to the feed store, to his meetings, where she waited in the parking lot and ate the hedge. Today she was wearing a little vest with a flag on it, and she was walking in the parade at the end of a red leash, behind the Little League and in front of the Ladies Auxiliary in their convertible, and she had stopped to eat a geranium out of the window box at the Kunkle house.

"Margaret," said Freddie.

The Ladies Auxiliary convertible idled behind her. The Little League marched on without them, in their blue caps, with Josh Gehman walking backward in front of them telling them to stay in line. Josh had taken over the team in April. He was the borough's chief of police and he coached exactly the way he did police work, which was with great patience and a whistle he never used.

Margaret finished the geranium and started on a second one.

"Give her a minute," said Walt, from the curb.

"She's had a minute. She's had the whole window box." Freddie gave the leash a small, apologetic tug. "Mrs. Kunkle, I'm going to buy you some geraniums."

"Ach, let her eat," said Mrs. Kunkle, on her porch, in a folding chair, with a little flag in her hand. "It's the most excitement I had on this porch since 1978."

Margaret came away at last, chewing, with a red petal stuck to her beard, and the parade closed up behind her and went on. At the cemetery gate Walt checked his watch. Fourteen minutes. It was a record, and he was glad.

Grace stood beside him at the cemetery with her hand through his arm while the color guard fired the salute and a boy from the high school played taps on a trumpet, not quite all the way up the last note. Freddie stood at attention with his cap over his heart and the leash in his other hand, and Margaret, for once, stood still. Freddie had served. Walt had not. He stood at the back, every year, out of respect, and every year Freddie came and got him and brought him to the front.

Afterward the fire company held its chicken barbecue on the field behind the fire hall. There was a long cinder block pit with half chickens on wire racks over it and three men in aprons turning them, and the smoke went straight up into a white sky, and the whole town stood in line for it with paper plates.

"Two hundred and forty five," said Freddie, in line.

"Days?"

"Days." He was a big man, gray in the beard now, with a red face from the sun and a voice that carried to the back of any room he was in. He said the number quietly. "I don't tell people. I'm telling you."

"It's very good, Freddie."

"It's a number." He shifted the leash to his other hand. "You'd know. You like numbers."

Walt did like numbers. He had spent forty one years as an accountant on Main Street, doing the books and the taxes for half of Vera Crus, until he retired last June and found out, in the space of a summer and a fall and a winter, that he was not very good at being retired. He had kept the fire company's books for thirty years. He had found a hole in them that nobody else saw. He had been involved, by Grace's count, in four murders since then, which Grace said was four more than a retired man needed, and a fifth would be over her dead body. She did not say that last part anymore. It had stopped being funny around the third one.

In April he had finished a tax season he had not meant to work, at an office he no longer owned, and had handed the key back to the young man who did own it, Tanner Ruth, who had bought the practice from him on a bank loan and a promise to pass the CPA exam, and had walked home down Main Street to his father's oak desk. He had been home for six weeks. He had cleaned the gutters twice. He had alphabetized the spice rack, which Grace had made him put back. He had sat at the oak desk every morning with a legal pad and nothing to write on it.

They had reached the front of the line. Bud Seip, the fire company president, put a half chicken on Walt's plate with a pair of tongs, and a scoop of potato salad, and a roll, and leaned across the table.

"Somebody's looking for you, Walt," he said.

"Who?"

Bud pointed his tongs.

A young woman was coming across the field from the parking lot. She was walking fast, in white sneakers, between the picnic tables, and she had a headset on over her hair, a little black one with a microphone, and three lanyards around her neck, and she was carrying a plastic laundry basket on her hip. It was a blue laundry basket. It was full of paper.

She was talking. Walt thought at first she was talking to him, and then he understood she was talking to the headset.

"No," she said. "No, that's fine. No, tell him the stage is fine. Tell him we'll have the generator. I know. I know. I'll call you back." She stopped in front of Walt. She was out of breath. "Mr. Brubaker? Walter Brubaker?"

"Yes."

"Oh, thank God." She shifted the basket to her other hip and held out a hand. "Brooke Lindemuth. Lindemuth Events, in Reading. I'm the promoter. Of the festival. The revival. You've heard about the revival."

Everybody had heard about the revival. It had been in the Morning Call in March, and on Channel 69, and in the bulletin at St. Paul's. The Kutztown Folk Festival, which had run for nine days every summer but one around the Fourth of July since 1950, and closed in 2024 because nobody came anymore, was coming back for one summer. Its seventy fifth. The week of the Fourth, at the old fairgrounds up Route 222.

"I've heard," said Walt.

"We need a treasurer," said Brooke Lindemuth.

Walt had a chicken in one hand and a roll in the other. He glanced down at them.

"Our first treasurer quit," said Brooke. "In May. Mr. Fegley. He had a heart thing. Not a heart attack. A heart thing. His doctor said no stress, and his wife said no festival, and he left me the books." She lifted the laundry basket a few inches, as evidence. "These are the books."

Walt peered into the laundry basket.

There were receipts in it. There were a great many receipts in it, loose, and folded, and crumpled, and some of them were in envelopes and some of them were held together with binder clips and one bundle was held together with a hair tie. There were invoices and bank slips and a checkbook with the cover torn off. There was a spiral notebook with a coffee ring on it. There was a receipt on a paper napkin from a Wawa. There was, near the top, a receipt written in ballpoint on a white paper plate.

Walt set his own plate down on the end of the picnic table, carefully, and sat down beside it.

"Walter," said Grace.

She had come up behind him with her own plate. She was wearing her blue blouse with the white collar, and her reading glasses on a chain, and her straw hat, and her eyes went from the laundry basket to Brooke to Walt. None of it seemed to surprise her.

"You must be Brooke," she said. "I'm Grace. We spoke on the phone."

Walt turned around on the bench.

"You spoke on the phone?"

"Mrs. Brubaker has agreed to chair the quilt barn," said Brooke. "For the festival. She called me. In April. She said she'd chaired the quilt barn at the Lutheran bazaar for twelve years, and she knew every quilter in three counties, and she knew how to run a line."

"I do know how to run a line," said Grace.

"And she said," said Brooke, "that her husband did books."

Walt turned around the other way.

"I told her you'd be glad to help," said Grace. "You've been cleaning the gutters."

"The gutters needed cleaning."

"Twice, Walter." She set her plate down beside his and sat. "It's nine days. July third to July eleventh. You'll have the cash box and the bank and the vendors, and you'll sit in an air conditioned trailer while I stand in a barn with two thousand quilts in July. You'll be fine."

"How do you know the trailer is air conditioned?"

"I asked," said Grace.

Brooke's headset made a small noise. She put her hand to it. "I'm sorry. One second. Hello? No. No, the porta potties are the first. The first. Not the third. I know. I'll call you back." She took her hand away. "Mr. Brubaker, I'm not going to lie to you. I'm going to be completely honest with you. It's a mess."

Walt's eyes went back to the paper plate.

"I can see that," he said.

"We have sponsors," said Brooke. "They're in process. We have two hundred vendors. We have six stages. We have the fairgrounds through the eleventh. We have a quilt sale and an auction and Pennsylvania Dutch food and a children's barnyard and fireworks on the Fourth. We have everything a festival needs." She took a breath. "We just don't know how much money we have. Or where it is. Mr. Fegley wasn't very..."

She looked at the laundry basket.

"He was very nice," she said.

"I'm sure he was," said Walt.

Freddie leaned over his shoulder, chewing, and peered in too.

"Holy smokes," said Freddie. "Is that a plate?"

"It's a receipt," said Brooke. "It's for the tent rental. The tent man didn't have paper."

"He had a plate," said Freddie.

"He had a plate," said Brooke.

Margaret, at the end of her leash, put her front feet up on the bench and studied the basket with great interest. Walt moved it out of her reach without thinking about it, as he had once moved the coffee pot out of reach of a three year old Kyle, and set it on his lap.

It was heavier than it looked. He had known it would be.

"He'll be there at seven," said Grace.

"I haven't said yes."

"You picked it up," said Grace, "the second the goat looked at it."

They went home at four. Grace went upstairs to lie down with a damp cloth on her forehead, which she did after every barbecue and called resting her eyes, and Walt carried the laundry basket into the little room off the living room and set it on the floor beside his father's oak desk, with the dusty cardboard box of old festival files that Brooke had handed him on top of it, which he did not open, because it said 2024 on the side and was none of his business.

It had been Kyle's room once. Then it had been nobody's room, where Grace kept the sewing machine and the Christmas wrapping paper, and for the last year it had been the room with the desk. The desk was under the window that looked out over the Yoders' field. It was a big plain oak desk with six drawers and a brass lamp on the corner, and a cigarette burn on the left side from when his father still smoked, and a long pale scratch near the front edge where Kyle, at four, had driven a toy dump truck across it at full speed. His father had bought it secondhand in 1952. Walt had sold it with the practice, and nearly lost it to a man from Macungie who wanted to make it into a bar, and gotten it back, and he sat at it now every morning and thought about how close it had come.

He sat at it now. He turned on the lamp, although it was still light out. He took a new yellow legal pad from the right hand drawer and three pencils, sharpened them in the sharpener clamped to the edge of the desk, and lined them up beside the pad.

Then he picked up the paper plate.

Tent, it said, in blue ballpoint, in a man's hand that leaned to the right. 40 x 80. 9 days. Dep. paid $2,500 cash. Bal. due July 1. $6,200. Thx, Gary. A phone number with an Allentown area code, and a smiley face.

Walt studied it for a while. He wrote on the legal pad: Tent. Gary. Dep. $2,500 cash (rec'd from whom?). Bal. $6,200 due 7/1. He drew a line under it. He set the plate face down on the right side of the desk, which was going to be the pile of things he had written down, and reached into the basket for the next one.

It was a Wawa receipt for two coffees and a soft pretzel. He wrote it down.

He worked until the window went gray and then dark, and the Yoders' field disappeared, and the lamp made a yellow circle on the desk with him inside it. He could hear Grace moving around upstairs, and then on the stairs, and then in the kitchen. The kettle. A cupboard door. She did not come in. She knew how he got when he was working, and she had told him once, early on, that it was like watching a man fish.

By nine o'clock the basket was a third empty and the legal pad was eleven pages full and he knew three things.

He knew that the festival had taken in, so far, about one hundred and forty thousand dollars, in sponsorships and vendor deposits and advance tickets.

He knew that it had spent, or promised to spend, about one hundred and ninety thousand.

And he knew that nobody, not Brooke Lindemuth and not poor Mr. Fegley with his heart thing, had any idea that the second number was bigger than the first, because nobody had ever added them up in the same place.

He sat back in the chair. It creaked, as it always had. His father's chair had creaked in that exact spot for as long as he could remember, a little complaint from the left arm when you leaned back, and he had never had it fixed because he would have missed it.

Fifty thousand dollars short, and five weeks to go.

It was not, he thought, the worst set of books he had ever seen. The worst set of books he had ever seen had belonged to a chicken farmer in Upper Milford who kept them on the back of feed bags, in 1987. This was the second worst. It belonged to the Kutztown Folk Festival.

He had a sudden, clear picture of the fairgrounds in July. The heat coming up off the dirt. The smell of funnel cake and cut hay and diesel from the generators. The long white barns, and the quilts hanging inside them in rows, red and green and blue and gold, like the inside of a church. He had not been to the festival since it closed. He had not been very often before that, either, not in twenty years. Grace had gone with her sister every summer and come home with a bag of whoopie pies and a sunburn, and he had stayed home and done the quarterlies.

He had been once, though, that mattered.

He opened the top drawer of the desk to put away his pencils. The drawer was his father's drawer, and it had a smell, of old wood and pencil shavings and the oil his father had rubbed into the runners every spring, and it slid out smooth. Inside were the things that had always been inside it: a box of paper clips, a roll of stamps, a photograph of Kyle at the shore at six with a bucket, and a plain brown envelope, the kind with a string tie, that held his CPA certificate from 1984.

His hand touched the envelope on its way to the back of the drawer, and stopped there.

He did not open it. He knew what was in it. He sat with his hand on it for a moment, in the yellow circle of the lamp, with the dark field outside the window and the laundry basket at his feet and Grace in the kitchen running water into the sink. Then he put the pencils in the drawer beside it, in a row, points facing the same way, and slid the drawer shut.

"Walter," Grace called from the kitchen. "There's pie."

"What kind?"

"Strawberry rhubarb. The first strawberries from the Yoders'."

He got up. The chair complained. He turned off the lamp, and then turned it back on, and wrote at the bottom of the eleventh page, in small square letters: Fegley. Who has the bank card?

Then he went to have pie.