Forty One Years to the Penny

When the plates were cleared, I got the shoebox off the counter and set it in the middle of the table, and I set my debit card on top of the lid.

Darren looked at it. He is a quick man. I saw him know.

“The bank called you,” he said.

“The grocery store told me. Thursday afternoon, with a line behind me. I had fifty-two dollars of groceries on the belt and a card that was good for forty.”

Pam made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth.

“Rita,” Darren said. “I can explain what we were thinking.”

“I want you to. I’ve been waiting two days to hear it. Go on.”

He laid his hands flat on my table.

“You know about my mother.”

I did. Judy lives in Ogallala. In the spring of 2023 a man called her on the telephone and said he was her grandson, said he was our Jeff, and that he was in a jail in another state and needed bond money and please don’t tell Dad. She drove to her bank and took out $6,400 and sent it where the man told her to. She did not tell a soul for three weeks. Darren found out when her propane bill bounced.

“Nobody stopped her,” he said. “The teller counted it out and wished her a nice day. I couldn’t get it back. I talked to the sheriff, I talked to the bank, I talked to everybody. It was just gone. And she’d been fine, Rita. That’s the thing. Everybody said she was fine, right up until.”

“I remember.”

“And then you lost your keys.”

“I put my keys in a drawer,” I said, “and four women piled dish towels on them.”

“I know that now.”

“You knew it the next morning. I called and told Pam where they were.”

He did not have an answer for that. He looked at his hands.

“I just thought, if there’s a limit on it, the worst anybody can get is forty dollars. I asked what the lowest was. I thought I was building a fence.”

“Around what?”

“Around you.”

“Darren,” I said. “Did you notice you left me the checkbook?”

He looked up.

“If I were what you told that bank I was, the card is not the dangerous thing. A card has a number they can shut off. The dangerous thing is a book of blank checks and a woman who will sign them. You left me every one of those. I wrote one Thursday, right in front of everybody, for more than your limit. You didn’t build a fence. You put a lock on one window and told the whole town why.”

Pam was crying by then, without any noise.

“I’m going to tell you what I think, and then I’m going to be done with it. I checked, Darren. The first thing I did Thursday night was look to see whether a dollar had moved that I didn’t move. I am sorry to say I looked. Not one had. You are not crooked. I never thought so, and I can prove it now, which is better.

“What you are is a man who cannot stand a thing he isn’t running. Something frightened you two years ago, and you could not fix it, and you have been fixing everything in reach ever since. My smoke detectors. My pill box. Now my pocketbook. You did it behind my back because some part of you knew that if you asked me, I would say no. And a thing you have to do behind a person’s back is not protection. I don’t care how good the reason is.”