The Little Blue Book at the Bank

How I came to owe nothing and be owed everything

I should tell you how we got there, because none of it started with a truck.

It started two Octobers before that, at four minutes after two in the morning, when my phone lit up on the nightstand and I saw my daughter’s name and knew before I answered that somebody was hurt.

“Mom,” Jessa said, and then she could not say anything else for a while. I sat up in the dark and put my feet on the cold floor and waited.

Brandon had been at a bachelor party at the bar out by the lake. He had driven home. At the stop sign where the county road meets Highway 59, he had not stopped soon enough, and he had run into the back of a little blue Honda.

The woman in the Honda was a nurse coming off a late shift. She broke her wrist on the steering wheel. Thank God that was all, but in Iowa that was plenty.

I had worked thirty-one years as the secretary at our elementary school. I had typed up a lot of things in that time. I knew a little about the law the way you know a little about everything when you answer the phone at a school.

What I did not know was that in Iowa, if you drive drunk and somebody breaks a bone, it can stop being a plain OWI. It becomes OWI causing serious injury. That is a felony. It can mean prison.

Brandon sat in the county jail in the next town over until noon the next day. The judge set a cash bond of five thousand dollars. Jessa did not have it. Brandon’s father did not have it, not in cash, not that week.

I had it. I drove over with a cashier’s check and sat on a plastic chair under a buzzing light until they brought him out. He was wearing the same jeans from the night before. He would not look at me.

I want to say here that I got that five thousand back. When the case was over, the bond came back to me, minus a few small fees. So that is not the money this story is about.

The money this story is about is the lawyer.

The public defender’s office was overloaded, and everyone we talked to said the same thing. With a felony on the table, you want somebody who does nothing but this. So we found a man in Council Bluffs who did nothing but this.

His retainer was fifteen thousand dollars. By the time it was over, with the expert on the blood test, the accident reconstruction, and all the hours, it was thirty-eight thousand dollars.

Jessa and Brandon had a mortgage, a car payment, and a five-year-old. They had about nine hundred dollars in their checking account. I knew, because Jessa read me the number off her phone, crying.

My husband, Dale, died of a heart attack in the spring of 2019. He was a rural mail carrier for twenty-six years. He left me the house, his pension, and a firm belief that you take care of your own.

Between Dale and me, there had always been a plan. My IPERS pension, his pension, and the 403(b) I put into at the school, a little out of every check, for three decades. That last one was my cushion.

I was sixty-one when Brandon hit that car. I could take money out of the 403(b) without a penalty, but not without taxes. To put thirty-eight thousand dollars in that lawyer’s hands, I had to take out closer to forty-six.

The woman at the investment company asked me twice if I was sure. I said I was sure. I was not sure of anything except that my daughter was crying every night and my grandson kept asking why Daddy was sad.