The Little Blue Book at the Bank

The idea

Wyatt’s birthday is September fourteenth. He was turning seven.

I had a card. I had bought it in June, a card with a dinosaur on it that roared when you opened it. I had a twenty-dollar bill for inside. I did not know if Brandon would let him have it.

The week before, I was sitting at my kitchen table going through the drawer by the stove for a recipe, and my hand touched that note. I took it out and read it again. Then I took out my bank statements.

There they were. Eight deposits, five hundred dollars each. Four thousand dollars. Brandon’s money, paid back honestly, in the months when he was trying.

I sat there a long time. And something settled in me, the way it does sometimes when you have prayed for a thing and stopped expecting the answer.

That four thousand dollars was the best of Brandon. It was the part of him that sat at my table and signed his name twice. I did not want it in my checking account, buying my groceries. I wanted it somewhere it could do some good.

Opening the account

On the morning of September fourteenth, I put on my good slacks and drove to the bank on Main Street. Karen saw me come in and set down her coffee.

“I want to open a savings account,” I said. “For my grandson. In his name.”

She raised her eyebrows, but she pulled out the forms.

For a child, she explained, it has to be a custodial account. The money belongs to Wyatt, but an adult manages it until he is grown. I would be the custodian. She needed his full name, his birth date and his Social Security number.

I had the number. I had written it down two summers before, on the forms for the Bible day camp at the Lutheran church, and I had kept a copy in my file because I am a school secretary and I keep copies of everything.

“Do you want a card for it?” Karen asked. “Online access?”

“Do you still have the passbooks?” I said.

She smiled for the first time all morning. “For you, I do. I keep a box for the kids. They like to see it written down.”

I wrote out a check for four thousand dollars. Karen typed, and stamped, and wrote the first line in the little blue book in her neat bank handwriting. Deposit. Four thousand dollars. Balance. Four thousand dollars.

Then she slid it across the counter to me, and I opened the cover, and I took a pencil out of my purse.

On the inside of the cover, at the top, I wrote one line. Payments from your dad, 8 of 76.

That was all. Thirty-eight thousand divided by five hundred is seventy-six. Eight of them had been made. I did not write anything about the sixty-eight that had not.

Karen read it upside down. She did not say anything. She just reached across and squeezed my hand, once, and let go.

The mailbox

I put the passbook inside the roaring dinosaur card, along with the twenty-dollar bill. I wrote in the card, “Happy 7th birthday, Wyatt. I love you to the moon. Grandma.”

I did not write a letter. I did not write anything to Jessa or to Brandon. I had thought about it. I had written three different letters at my kitchen table and torn all three up.

Every one of them was a lecture. Every one of them was a bill, dressed up in nicer words. The passbook said everything I needed it to say, and it said it in numbers, and numbers do not raise their voice.

I addressed the envelope to Jessa, not to Brandon and not to Wyatt. I wanted my daughter to be the one who opened it. I drove it to the post office myself so it would be postmarked on his birthday.

Then I went home and baked a chocolate cake with nobody to eat it, because I always bake him a chocolate cake on his birthday, and I was not going to stop just because he was not there.