"I don't think," she said, and her voice cracked, and she stopped and started again. "I don't think Cora ever imagined this many of you would come. I know I didn't. Lupe tells me we have two hundred and ninety-one trustees of the Sunflower Theatre present this evening, and about four hundred guests, and most of them never got a phone call from Danny or Lupe, they got one from somebody who did. Every one of you is welcome, and the trustees will vote and the guests will kindly be quiet when they do." There was laughter, warm and nervous. "I'm going to read you a letter."
She read it. All of it. The forty-five thousand dollars and the Cora Lindqvist Room and the marquee sunflower in a glass case in a bank lobby. She read the county's appraisal. She read Lonnie Ebert's deadline, and the roof estimate, and the balance in the trust account, four thousand one hundred and six dollars and twelve cents, and her voice didn't shake on any of it. Then she took off her glasses.
"I've been asked to make a recommendation," she said. "I told Mr. Hadley's lawyers that I would recommend we accept. I told Danny Kowal the same. I've been sitting in that booth out front for twenty-three years, and I'm tired, and I'm scared, and I can do arithmetic." She looked out at them. "I'm going to keep my word and make that recommendation. And then I'm going to ask you to do something I couldn't figure out how to do, which is find another answer. Mr. Hadley has asked to speak. Royce?"
Royce Hadley stood up. He didn't go to the stage. He turned around in the aisle and faced the house, and he was good—Danny had to admit it, would always have to admit it—he was very good. He talked about Merritt. He talked about the salt plant closing and the kids moving to Wichita and Kansas City and never coming back, and the empty storefronts on Main Street, and two hundred jobs. He talked about how he'd grown up here, too, how he'd sat in these seats. He talked about how much he respected Hazel Dunning and Ansel Voss and every person in this room. He talked about the plaster in the balcony and what would happen if it came down on a child. He did not raise his voice once. He said that sometimes loving a thing meant letting it go before it hurt somebody, and when he sat down, there was a scattering of applause, and not only from the front row.
"Before the vote," Mrs. Dunning said, "we have one piece of business. Cora's rule. Danny?"
He hadn't known she would do it then. He walked down the side aisle with seven hundred people watching him, and his legs felt like they belonged to someone else, the way his hands had felt in the lobby with Royce's fist at his throat. He climbed the four steps at the side of the stage. Ansel turned the Book of Aisles around and handed him a fountain pen, an old black Parker with a gold nib, and pointed.
Daniel J. Kowal. Hired Aug. 17, 1984.
He wrote the date of completion. He signed his name. His hand was steady. He didn't know how.
"Danny's a trustee now," Mrs. Dunning said into the microphone, and there was applause, real applause, and somebody in the back rows whistled with two fingers, and Lupe whooped. "Danny, would you like to say anything? You don't have to."
He looked out at them. Seven hundred faces under the gold. Mrs. Olin. Father Ochs. Officer Pruitt with his wife. Kenny Strand and his mother in the ninth row. His own mother, in the back, standing by the doors in her pink scrubs, because she'd come straight from her shift. Royce Hadley in the front row, watching him with a pleasant, patient look, the look of a man waiting for a boy to freeze.