The Cookie Fund on Every Check

The memo line

On the first of November I sat down at my kitchen table with my checkbook, the same kind of blue Bic pen I’d used for thirty-one years at the bank, and my reading glasses.

Pay to the order of Little Lambs Child Care. One thousand one hundred sixty and no/100. Signed, Sharon R. Kolb.

Then I looked at the memo line.

For two and a half years I had written “Lily, November” or “Lily, March.” Tellers love a memo line. It’s the only part of a check where a person tells you something true about why the money is moving.

I sat there with the pen over that line for a long time. Then I wrote two words.

Cookie fund.

I’d like to tell you that was grace. It wasn’t, not entirely. It was the only thing I let myself say. Every other word I swallowed. Those two I let out, in small blue letters, on a line I figured nobody but a bank clerk would ever read.

I drove the check over myself, like always, on the first Thursday of the month. I went in the side door, down the stairs, and handed it across the counter in an envelope with a white bakery bag of kolaches from the Czech bakery on Main for the teachers, like I had every month since Lily started.

Mrs. Vander Wal took the envelope. She did not open it in front of me.

“Lily’s doing well,” she said. “She asks about you.”

“Tell her Grandma says hello.”

“I will.”

December, cookie fund. January, cookie fund. February, the coldest one, when the wind came across the fields so hard the snow went sideways past the church windows, cookie fund.