The Lobby My Husband Built

Every Tuesday for the last three years, I have gotten up, put on real clothes, done my hair, and driven the mile and a half into town to sit in the lobby of the First State Bank of Fenmore. I want to be honest about why, because the why is the whole thing. It was not about the banking. A woman can do her banking from a chair in her own kitchen now, on a telephone, and everyone under sixty keeps telling me so. I went because it was the one place left in my week where somebody knew my name and was glad to see my face.

My name is Leona Barnhart. I am seventy-four years old. My husband Ward has been gone three years this past March, and if you have not buried the person you built your whole life around, I cannot fully explain to you what the quiet does. It is not the big grief people warn you about. It is the small silences. It is that nobody says your name out loud for days at a time. You start to feel like a rumor of a person. And a widow learns, fast, to build herself a route through the week that puts her in front of other human beings on purpose, or she will go a whole month and touch no one and be touched by no one, and something in her will begin to go out like a pilot light.

Tuesday was the bank. That was my day. I would come in around nine-thirty, after the first rush, and Lynette at the second window would call out “Miss Leona” before the door even shut behind me, and I would make some little transaction, move a bit of money, cash a small check, buy a roll of quarters I did not need, and then I would take my coffee to the chair by the front window, the good chair with the arms, and I would sit. Sometimes for an hour. Delmar, an old farmer I have known sixty years, took the chair beside me most Tuesdays, and we would argue about the weather and the ballgame and whose grandchildren had turned out spoiled. The tellers knew how I took my coffee. When my sugar ran high one winter, Lynette started keeping the pink packets behind the counter for me without my ever asking. That is what that lobby was. It was a warm room full of people who knew me, and for a woman who lives alone at the end of a county road, a warm room full of people who know you is not a small thing. It is close to everything.