The Cookie Fund on Every Check

The cookie

My name is Sharon Kolb. I am sixty-three years old, and I spent thirty-one years as a teller and then head teller at the First National branch in Harrisburg, South Dakota, a town that used to be a grain elevator and a Dairy Queen.

Now it is a town of new subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, people who work in Sioux Falls and want a yard. My son Brian and his wife Ashley bought one of those new houses on a street named after a tree that does not grow here.

The Thursday before the list, I had picked Lily up early. I did that most Thursdays. Ashley works late at the pharmacy on Thursdays, until seven, and Brian is on the road half the week.

That afternoon it was raw and gray, the first real cold of the fall, and Lily came out of her room with her cheeks red and her stomach growling. She told me so. “My tummy is talking, Grandma.”

I keep a tin of oatmeal cookies in my car in the fall. I have done it for forty years. Ron used to say I could feed a harvest crew out of my glove box.

So in the car, before I buckled her in, I gave her one oatmeal cookie on a paper napkin. One. It had raisins in it, which she picked out and handed to me one at a time like little gifts.

The napkin was one of mine, the kind with the blue cornflowers printed in the corner. Lily traced the flowers with her finger and asked what they were called. I told her. She said “corn flower” like two words, very seriously, and then she folded the napkin into a square and put it in her jacket pocket.

That was the whole incident.

That night Ashley texted me. I still have it. It said: “Lily told me you gave her a cookie. We have talked about this. No added sugar before age 4. I need you to respect our rules.”

I wrote back: “I’m sorry. It was one oatmeal cookie. I won’t do it again.”

She didn’t answer. I thought that was the end of it.

Six days later I was standing in a church basement in front of two women I would see at the grocery store for the rest of my life, being told I could not take my own granddaughter home.

The part nobody knew

Here is the thing that I had never told Ashley, and that I did not tell Mrs. Vander Wal’s lobby that day either.

I had paid for Lily’s daycare since she was eleven weeks old.

One thousand one hundred sixty dollars a month. That is what full-time toddler care costs at Little Lambs in the basement of Harrisburg Reformed Church. It was more for infants. I paid that too.

It started the spring Lily was born. Ron had been gone six months by then. Brian came over on a Sunday afternoon and sat at my kitchen table and turned his coffee cup around and around without drinking it, which is what he has done since he was fifteen when something is wrong.

“Ash wants to go back to work,” he said. “She loves her job. She’s good at it, Mom. She’s the one the old farmers ask for when they don’t understand their pills.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Daycare’s eleven hundred and change. With the house payment and her student loans, we can’t do it. Not this year. Maybe not next year. She’d have to quit.”

I knew what he was asking before he asked it. I had worked a teller window for thirty-one years. You learn to see a loan request coming across the lobby.

Ron and I had saved. Ron had life insurance through the co-op, and I had my pension and a paid-off house. I was not rich. But I was a widow with no debts and nobody to spend on, and here was my son with his head down.

“I’ll pay it,” I said.

He looked up. “Mom, I wasn’t asking you to…”

“Yes, you were, and that’s all right. I’ll pay it directly to the daycare. First of every month.”

He let out a breath. Then he said the thing that set the whole next three years in motion.