Forty One Years to the Penny

I sat down. I had been standing at the counter with the phone cord wrapped around my wrist, because I still have a phone with a cord in the kitchen, and I sat down in Lowell’s chair.

“I never asked for that,” I said.

“No, ma’am. It was put on Monday.”

“By who?”

She was quiet again. She was deciding, I could tell, what she was allowed to say. I helped her.

“Kendra, it is my account and my card and my name. I am not asking you to tell me somebody else’s business. I am asking you to tell me mine.”

“It was a request from the joint owner on the account,” she said. “Pamela.”

Pam. My daughter.

I had put Pam’s name on that account four years ago, the week after we buried her father. The girl at the bank at the time had said it was a sensible thing to do, in case I was ever laid up in the hospital and the light bill came due. I would do it again.

“Is there anything else written there?” I asked.

“There’s a note.”

“Read it to me, please.”

“Mrs. Becker, I don’t know if I should.”

“I know you don’t, honey. Read it anyway. If anybody gives you trouble over it, you send them to me.”

She read it in a small voice, the voice you would use to read something off a headstone.

“Family reports customer is getting confused. Son-in-law requests lowest available card limit for her protection. Joint owner signed. Customer not to be alarmed.”

Customer not to be alarmed.

“Thank you, Kendra,” I said. “What time does your lobby open in the morning?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Will you be working?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then I’ll see you at nine.”

I hung the phone up on its hook.

I was not angry yet. What I felt first was cold all the way down, the way you feel when you miss a step in the dark. Getting confused. Somebody had said that about me out loud, in a building full of people who know me, and it had sat in a machine since Monday while I went about my week not knowing.

I knew where it had come from, too. I knew exactly.

Back in August, I helped serve the funeral luncheon for Donna Pruitt’s husband in the church basement. Ham, scalloped potatoes, eleven kinds of bars. When it was over I could not find my car keys. I looked in my purse three times. I looked on the coat rack and in the ladies’ room. Pam had come to help wash up, and in the end she drove me home, with Darren following in my car on the spare key.

The keys turned up the next morning in the dish towel drawer in the church kitchen. I had tucked them there to keep them off the wet counter while I dried roasters, and then four different women had put clean towels on top of them.

That was the whole of it. One set of keys, one afternoon, one drawer.

But Darren had been quiet in a certain way that night. He checked my smoke detectors before he left. He asked whether I still had my pills in the weekly box. I thought it was sweet at the time.

I picked the phone back up and dialed Pam’s number, all but the last digit.

Then I set it down again.

I could have called her. I thought about it for most of an hour. But I could hear how it would go. I would say, I am not confused. And she would say, Mom, nobody said you were. And Darren would get on the line and be reasonable at me. And when it was over, all they would have was an old woman on the telephone, upset, saying she was fine.