The Bank Card He Called Severance

The morning I fainted

Then last spring, on a Tuesday, I fainted at the bottom of the garage stairs.

I remember reaching for the mailbox at the end of the drive and the world going bright and thin, like a television with the color turned all the way up and then all the way off. I remember the sound of my keys hitting the concrete. I remember Glenda’s dog barking like the whole block had cracked in half. And then I remember a paramedic’s face very close to mine, and him asking me my name, and me being embarrassed, of all things, embarrassed that they were going to charge me for the ambulance.

At the hospital in the next county over they put a paper band around my wrist and asked me for insurance I did not have, and a young doctor with kind, tired eyes looked at my chart and then looked at me and did not soften it.

“Mrs. Sutter, your blood pressure is dangerously high, and your bloodwork tells me you have not been eating the way you need to for a long time,” he said. “If you do not get on medication and start taking care of yourself, this could turn very serious very fast. Do you understand me? This is not something to wait on.”

He gave me discharge papers and a prescription and that look. You know the look. The one people give an older woman when they realize she has been quietly minimizing her own pain for years because she did not think it was worth anybody’s trouble.

I rode the county van home with the prescription folded in my lap, and I did the arithmetic I always did, and the arithmetic did not work. The pills cost money I did not have. The follow-up cost money I did not have. And for the first time in five years, sitting in that van watching the corn go by, I let myself think about the card in the shoebox.

The shoebox

That night, under the yellow lamp, I took the shoebox down off the closet shelf.

Inside were the things that were mine. My birth certificate, soft as cloth at the folds. The divorce papers. A church program from my mother’s funeral. School pictures of Rachel and Wade with their front teeth missing and their hair combed wrong. And in a faded envelope at the bottom, Roy’s bank card, looking older than it had any right to look.

I turned it over in my hands. Three thousand dollars, he had said. And I thought about what three thousand dollars was, really, when you took his voice out of it. It was not dignity. Dignity does not come on a piece of plastic. But it was medicine. It was a ride to the clinic. It was maybe the difference between waking up in the morning and not.

Pride does not lower your blood pressure. Pride does not fill a prescription. I sat there a long time with the lamp humming and the coffee can dripping into itself, and I made peace with it the only way I could. I told myself I was not spending Roy’s money. I was spending five years of surviving in spite of him, and that was different. That was mine.

The next morning I put on my cleanest sweater, the gray one with the pearl buttons that I saved for church, and I slid the card into my mended purse, and I walked the mile and a half into town to the bank.