The 174 Payments I Canceled

A Phone Call to a Woman Who Said Yes

I did not call the bank’s main number. At twenty minutes to seven on a Friday, nobody there would do what I needed. I called Jan.

Jan has run the front desk at our branch for thirty-one years. She buried her own husband a month after I buried Norm, and in that terrible week she wrote her home number on the back of a deposit slip and pressed it into my palm and said, “In case you ever need somebody to say yes to you.” I had never used it.

She picked up on the fourth ring. “Irene?” she said. “It’s after six. Is everything all right?”

“I need you to stop everything that leaves my account for Brent Farrow’s household,” I said. “All of it. And I need his name taken off every account tonight, not Monday.”

She did not say anything for a second. I heard a pencil being found.

“All of it, Irene? Honey, do you understand what that touches?”

“I have the list in front of me,” I said. “I understand it better than he does.”

She asked me if I was sure, and I told her I had never been surer of anything except marrying Norm. She laughed, one short breath, and then her voice went careful and formal the way it does when she is protecting me.

“What I can do tonight is put holds on the access and flag the accounts. The recurring drafts run at six Monday morning. I can stop every one of them before they run, and I will, and I will tell you the count when I have it.”

“One hundred seventy-four,” I said.

She whistled low. “Irene Farrow. You have been carrying that family.”

“I have been carrying it,” I said. “I’m putting it down.”

“Do you want me to call Brent?”

“No.” I surprised myself with how steady that came out. “Don’t call him. Don’t explain it. Whatever he wants to know, he can find out the same way everybody finds out.”

“And how’s that?” Jan asked.

“When the money doesn’t come.”

I wrote my granddaughter back after that. I told her I loved her and that I would not be at dinner, and that she should not worry about her tuition for one second, because that was between me and the university and nothing in that folder would touch it.

To my son I sent a single line. “Then you and Becky can begin paying your own bills.”

I turned the phone face down. I cut myself a slice of the pecan pie and ate it standing at the kitchen sink, looking out at Norm’s old workshop, and it was the best pie I had made in years.

The Dinner I Did Not Attend

I let the phone ring through Friday night and most of Saturday. On Saturday evening Alice called from her dorm. She did not ask why I was not at the party. Alice is a good girl and she is not stupid.

“It was weird, Grandma,” she said, and her voice was small. “Dad kept looking at the door. Mom told everybody you weren’t feeling well. Then somebody from Dad’s work asked where his mother was, and Mom said you get confused in the evenings.”

I held the phone a little away from my ear for a moment, and then I put it back.

“She said what?”

“That you get confused. That you’ve been forgetting things. She said it like she was being nice.” Alice breathed in. “You’re not, though. Are you?”

“I put every one of my own bills in alphabetical order last Tuesday,” I said. “I am as confused as a tax collector.”

I told her the tuition was paid through the spring semester and that I would pay it directly to the registrar’s office from now on, so that it would never pass through anyone’s hands but mine and hers.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Grandma?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I’m sorry about Dad.”

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “Get some sleep. Something is going to start happening this week, and none of it is your fault.”