"I'm sorry," she said. "I said it was your decision. I'm sorry. I couldn't help it."
Danny sat down beside her. He picked up the envelope and read the statement. It was a page and a half long and every individual sentence in it was true, and it added up to a lie, and he could not have explained to anyone how that was possible, but he knew it was, the same way he knew where the motor switch was without looking.
"Mom," he said. "What would you do? If it was you."
She lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the corner of the towel.
"I'd want to sign it," she said. "God help me. Three hundred and ten dollars. I'd want to sign it so bad I could taste it." She looked at him. "And then I'd have to live with knowing I did. And you're the one who has to live with you, baby. Not me."
He didn't sign it. He didn't tear it up, either. He put it in his desk drawer under his old baseball cards, and he ate a piece of the rhubarb pie, which was, he had to admit, the best in town.
* * *
The trust's letter came to the Sunflower the following Wednesday, addressed to The Trustees of the Sunflower Theatre, c/o Mrs. Hazel Dunning, Manager, on the letterhead of a law firm in Wichita whose name had four men in it.
Mrs. Dunning read it in her office with the door open, and then she called Ansel down from the booth, and then, after a minute, she called Danny in from the lobby too, which she had never done. She had him close the door.
"I want you to hear this," she said, "because you'll be a trustee in eleven days, and I'm tired of being the only one who reads the mail."
The letter said that Mid-Continent Partners, in association with the Merritt Downtown Development Authority, was prepared to purchase the Sunflower Theatre property for the sum of forty-five thousand dollars, cash, conditioned upon a vote of the trustees approving the sale prior to the city commission's meeting of August 19. In recognition of the historic significance of the building, the community room on the ground floor of the new Riverside Square bank building would be named the Cora Lindqvist Room and would display a selection of artifacts from the theater, including, if the trustees wished, the original marquee sunflower. Should the trustees decline, the letter noted, the property would likely be acquired through the condemnation process at its appraised value, which the county had recently reassessed, given its condition, at eighteen thousand five hundred dollars.