The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday
The bank
Monday morning, I called in to the bus barn and got a sub for my route, which I had done exactly twice in nine years.
At nine o’clock Mom and I were sitting in front of Kim Jensen’s desk at the bank downtown. Kim has been doing Mom’s banking for fifteen years. She took one look at Mom and came around her desk and hugged her.
Mom wasted no time. She explained it plain. Her daughter had her debit card and had been using it. She wanted that card shut off this morning, and she wanted her money where only she could reach it.
Kim pulled up the account. Debra was not on it. Mom had never signed anything adding her. So Kim canceled the old card on the spot and opened Mom a new checking account in her own name only, with a new card and a new PIN that Mom memorized and did not write down.
“You’ll want your Social Security coming to the new account,” Kim said. “We can help you with that today. We’ll fill out the form right here and send it in, and it should switch over by next month’s payment.”
Mom signed everything in her own slanting cursive, the same handwriting that is on every birthday card I have ever gotten.
When we walked out of the bank, she stood on the sidewalk in the sun and put her new card in her billfold.
“There,” she said. “That’s done.”
Going home
That week, Mom moved back into her own house on Elm Street.
Tom brought the African violet over from Debra’s in the cab of his pickup with the heater running. Gary carried the suitcase out to him himself. Tom told me later the two of them stood in Debra’s driveway a while, not saying much, and then Gary said, “I should have gone down those stairs a lot sooner,” and Tom said, “Well, you went.”
Mom tested the new railing on the back step four times, up and down, with Tom standing at the bottom.
“It’s a good railing,” she said. “Your father would have liked it.”
That was as much as Tom needed. He drove home whistling.
We worked out the rest at her kitchen table. The Schroeder girl next door, Amy, is sixteen and saving for a car.
She agreed to stop in every day after school, check that Mom had eaten and taken her pills, carry in the mail, and sit for a while if Mom wanted company. Mom pays her twenty dollars a week and feeds her cookies, and I think Amy would come for the cookies alone.
I drive past twice a day anyway on my route. Mom started standing at her front window at 6:40 every morning and lifting her coffee cup to me when the bus went by. The kids on my bus started waving back.