Forty Years of Banking Across Main Street

The sidewalk

Bellmont, Missouri, has 2,100 people, one blinking light, one grain elevator, and, until that Thursday, one bank. Cass County Savings sits at Main and Second in a limestone building with a clock that has been four minutes slow since the Carter administration. Across the street, in the old Rexall building, under a green awning, is the Bellmont Area Credit Union.

Mother looked at the bank for a long time.

“Pamela,” she said. “We have banked here since 1984. Your father’s check went in that window every other Friday. I bought your wedding shoes with a loan from that window. It is a hard thing to stop being a customer.”

“I know it is.”

I should say what I did not do. I did not call Barry Ackerman, the bank president. I had his number. But Barry was at the bankers’ convention in Branson until Monday. And the plain fact was this: Craig is my daughter’s husband. Any fight I started would land in Amy’s kitchen, and on Lily, who is six. I wanted my mother to have a furnace. I did not want a war. A furnace is a thing you can finish by dark.

I also did not send Roscoe, which is the harder confession. My husband is sixty-eight. He put in twenty-nine years on the county road crew, and he is not a loud man, but when I told him that morning that the bank might say no, he reached for his cap.

He is also the one who had crawled under Mother’s house on Tuesday night with a flashlight and a mirror, and who could tell you without any argument that her furnace had a cracked heat exchanger and was not worth another dollar of repair. So when the letter came, he had the whole case in his head, and he wanted to carry it into that bank and set it on Craig’s desk.

“If you go, you’ll say it,” I told him. “And you’ll be right. And it will feel wonderful for about a minute. Then Amy will be in the middle of it, and Mother will still be cold.” I took the cap out of his hand and hung it back on its hook. “Drive us instead. Carry what I hand you.”

He looked at me a long moment, and then he did exactly that.

So I stood on the sidewalk with my mother and looked at the green awning.

“Mother, are you warm enough to walk?”

“I’m seventy-nine, not made of sugar.” But she did not move. “Pamela. Don’t do it on my account. Craig is family.”

“I’m not doing it for the account,” I said. “I’m doing it for the furnace.”

She breathed in once, the way she does before she lifts a roaster out of the oven. Then she took my arm.