The Card My Husband Left Me

It took me three months after that to go to the bank.

I did not go for the money. I want that clear too. I went because the farm was slipping and I could not hold it alone, and a lawyer in town had told me plain that I needed to settle every account with Harlan’s name near mine or the bank would tie me in knots, and the three thousand dollars in that card was in a savings account at Farmers and Merchants that I had never once logged into, never gotten a statement for, because I had had them hold all the mail at the branch the week he left so I would not have to see his name come through my door. So I had six years of unopened bank mail waiting for me in a box with my name on it, and a card in my Bible, and a plan to close the whole business out and be done with him for good.

Farmers and Merchants is the oldest building on the square, red brick, with a clock out front that has been eleven minutes slow my whole life. Nadine Pruitt has worked the teller window there since before I was married. She is near eighty now and they cannot make her retire and nobody tries. She knew my mother. She knew Harlan’s mother. She has cashed the harvest checks of four generations of this county and she knows which farms are failing before the farmers do.

I slid Harlan’s death certificate and my paperwork under the glass and I told her, in a voice I kept flat on purpose, that I wanted to close out the savings account and take whatever was in it and be finished.

Nadine did not take the papers. She looked at me a long moment over her glasses, and then she looked down at the account number, and something moved across her old face that I did not have a name for yet. She said, “Ellen. Honey. Do you not know what is in this account?”

I told her three thousand dollars, and I heard how hard my own voice was.

She did not say anything for a moment. She got up, which takes her a while, and she went to the back, and she came out with a passbook. One of the old kind, the little booklet they do not even make anymore, with the deposits written in by hand in columns. She set it down on the counter and she turned it around so it faced me and she opened it, and she stood back with her hands folded like a woman at a graveside.

The first line was dated the November he left. Three thousand dollars. The opening deposit.

The next line was dated the first of December that same year. Two hundred dollars.

The line under it was the first of January. Two hundred dollars.