Forty One Years to the Penny

“It says declined, ma’am.”

The boy at the register said it kindly, and he said it low, which I appreciated. He could not have been more than seventeen. He had a cowlick and a name tag that said Jeff, same as my grandson.

“Run it again, please,” I said.

He ran it again. The little machine thought about it and made the same flat sound.

“Declined,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

There were four people in line behind me at the grocery store on Jeffers Street. It was a quarter past four on a Thursday in October, and I could feel every one of them politely not looking at me.

My order came to $52.18. A chuck roast, potatoes, coffee, oleo, eggs, onions, dish soap, and the good bread. Nothing foolish in it.

I knew what was in that checking account. I do not mean I had a general idea. I mean that I had sat at my kitchen table on the first of the month, the way I have on the first of every month since 1985, and I had made the bank’s number and my number come out the same. There was $3,907.63 in that account on the last day of September. I had written it down in blue ink and drawn two lines under it.

So I did what I did for most of my life before anybody ever handed me a plastic card. I took my checkbook out of my purse.

“I’ll write you a check,” I said.

The boy looked at the checkbook like I had pulled out a butter churn. He had to call a woman over from the service desk to show him which slot it went in.

I wrote it out. Fifty-two and 18/100. I tore it off clean, and I entered it in the register before I put my pen away, the same as always, with the people waiting. Check number 6114.

I carried my own sacks to the car.

I am seventy-four years old. I kept the books for Kessler Lumber for thirty years, 1982 to 2012, payroll and payables and receivables and the quarterly taxes, for a yard that had eleven men on it at the busiest. In thirty years I was never once out of balance at year end. Not by a dollar. Mr. Kessler used to tell the salesmen that if Rita said the number was the number, they could go ahead and carve it on a board.

I drove home to West Fifth Street and put the roast in the icebox and called the bank.

I did not call the long number on the back of the card. I called the branch on Dewey Street, the one Lowell and I walked into in October of 1985 to move our account the same month we bought the house.

A young woman answered. “Good afternoon, this is Kendra, how can I help you?”

“Kendra, this is Rita Becker. My debit card was declined at the grocery store about twenty minutes ago for fifty-two dollars, and I have a good deal more than fifty-two dollars in my account.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Becker. Let me look.” She asked me my birth date and the last four of my Social Security, and I heard her keys going. Then I heard them stop.

It was a long stop.

“Mrs. Becker, there’s a limit on your card.”

“What kind of a limit?”

“A purchase limit. Forty dollars.” She cleared her throat. “Forty dollars a week.”