Forty One Years to the Penny

Anybody can say she is fine. I learned that at the lumberyard. A man can stand in your office all morning telling you he paid his bill. It matters what the ledger says.

I could have moved my money, too. There is another bank four blocks down, and they would have been glad to have it. But I had banked on Dewey Street for forty-one years, and besides, moving the money would not have moved the note. They would all go right on thinking it. I would just be confused at a different bank.

So I did not call anybody. I went to the hall closet instead.

On the top shelf, behind the Christmas tablecloth, there is a shoebox. It is a big one. Lowell’s work boots came in it, the last pair he bought before he retired from the railroad. He was a carman out at Bailey Yard for thirty-six years, and he went through boots the way other men go through socks.

I got the step stool and brought the box down and carried it to the kitchen table.

Inside it, standing on edge like recipe cards, were one hundred and twelve check registers. Every one the bank ever gave me. The oldest ones have a wheat sheaf printed on the cover. The first entry in the first one is dated October 14, 1985, an opening deposit of $1,160.00, in my handwriting, in blue ink.

All of it is in blue ink. Every line of forty-one years. Mr. Kessler kept the yard’s books in black, so I kept my own in blue, to keep from ever mixing the two up in my head. And at the bottom of every month there are the same two lines drawn with the edge of the same wooden ruler, and next to them a small check mark that means the bank and I agreed.

Lowell never balanced a checkbook in his life. He could rebuild the trucks under a boxcar in the dark, but he would hand me a gas receipt like it was a snake. What he did do, every single month, was come through the kitchen while I was working and put his hand on the back of my chair.

“Did we come out?” he would say.

“To the penny,” I would say.

“Then I married right.”

Every month. Four hundred and some months. He said it the month he died, from the bed we had set up in the front room, when I brought the register in to do it beside him so he would not be alone.

He has been gone four years in November. I still say it. On the first of the month I draw my two lines and I say, “To the penny,” out loud, to a kitchen with nobody in it.

Then I ate a fried egg, and laid out my navy cardigan, and went to bed.

At five minutes to nine on Friday morning I was standing on the sidewalk on Dewey Street with a shoebox in my arms.

Friday is a busy day at that bank. It is payday for half the town, and the ranchers come in from north of the river before the weekend. By the time the young man unlocked the doors there were six or seven of us waiting, with our collars up against the wind.