Forty Years of Banking Across Main Street

Mother signed. And then she did something I had not expected, and I do not think she had expected it either until it was out of her mouth.

“Pamela. Take the rest across, too.”

“The rest of what?”

“All of it. The checking. The savings. Whatever else they have.” She was looking through the window at Cass County Savings and its slow clock. “I won’t stand on that sidewalk again in my church coat, hoping a man will be kind to me. I’d rather my money slept somewhere it was welcome.”

So I carried it. That morning she had packed a banker’s box with everything Craig might ask her to prove: checking statements back to 1984, Howard’s old passbooks in a rubber band, the paid-off mortgage letter. Roscoe had it in the truck bed. I took it out of his arms at the curb and walked it across the street myself. Forty years of a woman’s money, carried by her daughter, on foot, in the October light.

Lois took the box from me without a word and set it on her desk the way you set down something that might spill.

The window

We still had to close the accounts at Cass County Savings. Mother wanted it done in person, and done clean. Roscoe waited in the truck with the heater on high, so there would be warm air for her when she came out.

Brittany was at the window. She is twenty-six, a sweet girl whose grandmother went to school with my mother. She went pale when Mother came through the door.

“I’d like to close my accounts, dear. All of them. A cashier’s check, please.”

Brittany’s hands shook as she typed. $4,212.36 in checking. $11,880.14 in savings. She looked at the savings number and then at me, and I watched her do the same arithmetic I had done on the sidewalk.

“Mrs. Ellison,” she said. “Is there something we did?”

“No, dear. Not you.”

The glass door of Craig’s office opened. He came out buttoning his jacket, the bass glinting under the fluorescent light.

“Dot. Come on. This is silly.”

My mother turned around. She is five foot one. He is six foot two. She looked at him the way she once looked at my daughter, age nine, who had fibbed about a broken window.

“Warm is not silly, Craig.”

He opened his mouth and closed it. “Pam,” Craig said, switching to me, “you’re being dramatic.”

“I’m being a customer,” I said. “She’s allowed to choose where she keeps her money. I’d have thought a man in your line of work knew that.”

I said it gently. I did not look at him again. I took the cashier’s check from Brittany and tucked it in Mother’s purse. We walked out into the wind and got into the truck, and Mother held both hands to the vent and closed her eyes.

“That was very hard,” she said, in a small voice.

We drove the forty yards back across Main Street. Lois stayed past five with her coat already over her chair, and Mother slid the cashier’s check under the glass: $16,092.50, every dollar she had at Cass County Savings. Lois entered it herself and handed over the receipt with both hands, like a diploma.