Forty One Years to the Penny

Walt Hendricks was one of them. Walt runs cattle up toward Stapleton and bought fence posts from Kessler’s for twenty-five years. He held the door for me and eyed the box.

Donna Pruitt was there, too, with her church envelope. I thought, well. Of all the people.

I did not go to the desks along the wall, where they take you to sit down and speak quietly. I waited my turn in the regular line like anybody, behind a boy in a tire shop shirt with a zippered bag. When Kendra’s window came open, I stepped up to it and set the shoebox on the counter and took the lid off.

She was younger than she had sounded, with a little cross on a chain. I watched her work out who I was.

“Mrs. Becker,” she said.

“Good morning, Kendra. Thank you for being straight with me yesterday.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m not here to holler at you. I want you to know that before anything else. You didn’t do this, and I would guess you didn’t care for it.”

Her chin did something. “No, ma’am, I didn’t.”

“All right, then.” I put my hand on the edge of the box. “These are my check registers. All of them. October of 1985 through yesterday afternoon, when I wrote a check for fifty-two dollars and eighteen cents because my card would not buy a pot roast. There are forty-one years in this box.”

She leaned forward to look.

“I kept books for a living for thirty years,” I said. “I have balanced this account every month since the day we opened it. Your bank has a note in its computer that says I am getting confused. So I would like you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Pick a month.”

She blinked. “Ma’am?”

“Any month. Any year. I didn’t choose it, so nobody can say I chose an easy one. You pick, and I will find that register, and I will read you my ending balance. Then you look at the bank’s own record and tell me whether a confused woman kept this.”

I had not raised my voice. I have never had much of a voice to raise. But a bank lobby is a quiet room, all carpet and glass, and a quiet room carries.

The window next to ours had stopped. Donna Pruitt had her envelope halfway across the counter and had forgotten it. Behind me I heard Walt say, not quite under his breath, “Well, now.”

Kendra looked at the box. She looked at her screen. Then she looked at me, and I saw her decide.

“March of 1997,” she said.

“Why that one?”

Her face went a little pink. “That’s the month I was born.”

“Then that’s a good month,” I said.

I keep them in order, naturally. I walked my fingers back through the booklets, past the ones with the eagle on the cover and into the green ones, and pulled out the register that ran from January to May of 1997. I put my glasses on from the chain around my neck and opened it on the counter between us, facing her.

There it was, the whole month, in a younger woman’s version of my same hand. Lowell’s paychecks from the railroad on the seventh and the twenty-first. The house payment, $412.00. The light bill. The propane for the shop heater. Twenty dollars to the church every Sunday, four Sundays.

And about two thirds of the way down, on March 22: Pam, prom dress, $64.99.

I had not known that would be in there. I had forgotten it was that spring. I looked at it a second longer than I needed to.