Four Envelopes on the Kitchen Table

We got the roast and the sauerkraut going, and I peeled potatoes while she told me about her neighbor’s new hip. Around one o’clock, with dinner set for three, I dried my hands and got my laptop from the desk in the living room and set it on the kitchen table.

Then I called up the stairs for Lily and Sam.

They came down in their stocking feet, curious. Sam had a red crayon in his hand because he had been drawing a picture of the skid steer for his teacher, and he did not let go of it.

Lily looked at the laptop and then at me, and I saw her figure out that this was something serious.

“Sit down, you two,” I said. “We’re opening something today.”

Joan was at the stove with her back to us. She turned the burner down under the sauerkraut and came and sat across the table from me with a dish towel over her shoulder.

I did not ask her to leave, and she did not offer. She has always had a good sense of when to stay.

The Minnesota College Savings Plan website is plain and blue and not very exciting. I had already read through all of it on my lunch breaks, every screen, so I knew where each box was.

I clicked the button to open an account, and I put myself as the owner and Lily as the beneficiary, and I typed in her birthday and her Social Security number from the card I keep in the fireproof box.

“What’s a beneficiary?” Sam asked, leaning on my arm.

“It means the person the money is for,” Lily said, before I could. She was reading every word on the screen. “It’s for college. Right, Mom? It’s a college fund.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It has seven years to grow before you need it. It can go to a university, or a two-year school, or a trade school if you want to be an electrician like Grandpa Ray was.”

I linked my checking account, and I typed five thousand dollars into the box for the first deposit, and I held my breath when I hit the button, the way I always do with big numbers, even after eleven years of watching other people’s big numbers.

Then I did the whole thing again for Sam. The second one went faster. It took eleven minutes, both accounts, start to finish.

I know because I looked at the clock on the stove when I started and when I was done.

I printed the confirmation pages on the little printer on the desk. The printer took forever to warm up, the way it always does in winter, and the three of us sat there listening to it grind while Joan watched us with her hands folded on the oilcloth.

When the pages came out, I put Lily’s in front of her and Sam’s in front of him. Lily read hers twice, top to bottom.

Then she put her finger on the number and just left it there, like she was keeping it from going anywhere.

Sam looked at his page for a long time. “Do I have to sign it?” he asked.

“It doesn’t need a signature, honey,” I said. “It’s already done. It’s yours.”

He thought about that. Then he uncapped nothing, because crayons do not have caps, and he bent over the paper and wrote his name across the bottom in red crayon, in letters about an inch tall. He went over the S twice to make it darker.

“Now it’s mine,” he said, and sat back.