Sixteen Years of Fridays at the Bank

The Fridays

Here is the part I had never told anyone. Not Angie. Not my mother. Not the guys at the shop, who would have ribbed me about it for a year.

Carson was born on a Friday in June, a little after four in the morning, at the hospital in Red Oak. I was twenty-three years old. I held him for an hour and then the nurse took him to get weighed, and Angie fell asleep.

I walked out into the parking lot to call my mother, and I realized I had never felt so broke in my life. Not short of money. Broke in the other sense, cracked open.

The bank on the square opened at nine. I was standing at the door at eight fifty with a twenty dollar bill in my wallet, which was every dollar I had on me.

The teller was a woman named Donna Schultz who had been at that window since before I was born. She had reading glasses on a beaded chain and a purple ink pad she was very particular about.

“I want to start a savings for my son,” I told her. “He’s five hours old.”

She smiled at me over those glasses. “We can do a regular savings account. Statements come in the mail.”

“Do you still have the books?” I asked. “The little ones you stamp? My grandpa had one. I want one he can hold.”

Donna looked at me a long moment. Then she bent down and came up with a small passbook from the bottom drawer. “We still do them for anybody who asks,” she said. “Not many people ask.”

I filled out the deposit slip at the counter with the bank pen on the little chain. I wrote his name and the date and twenty dollars. Then, I do not know why, I wrote “Carson, day one” across the top.

Donna stamped the book. Twenty dollars, a line of purple ink. She handed me the deposit slip back with my receipt, and I folded it and tucked it inside the front cover.

“You’ll want to keep that,” she said.

“I’m going to come every Friday,” I told her.

“They all say that, honey.”

The next Friday I came at lunch. Twenty-five dollars. I came the Friday after that, and the one after that.

Sixteen years of them

I want to be honest about it, because people like to make these things sound easier than they were.

Twenty-five dollars a week was not nothing for a twenty-three year old mechanic with a new baby. Some weeks it was the difference between the good coffee and the cheap stuff, and some weeks it was the difference between going out for supper and eating eggs.

When Brooke was born three years later, I went back to Donna on the Friday after and started a second book. Twenty dollars the first day, the same as her brother. Then twenty-five a week. Fifty dollars every Friday now.

I kept going after the divorce. I kept going on the weeks when I was so lonely in that house I could hear the refrigerator hum. Friday at noon, I walked in with grease on my knuckles and Donna stamped the books.

The spring the shop cut our hours, I put in ten dollars a week for nine weeks. It felt like failing. In August, when the harvest rush came and the overtime came with it, I made up every one of those missing dollars.

Donna retired four years ago. Her niece took the window, and the first Friday she saw me come in, she said, “Aunt Donna told me about you.” She had kept the purple ink pad.

Did I ever think about doing it differently? Sure. A college fund, a 529, something with better interest. A passbook savings at a small-town bank pays almost nothing. Some years it paid less than a tank of diesel.

But I did not want an account they would get a letter about. I wanted them to hold it in their hands and see the Fridays. Every single line of purple ink was one week I thought about them, whether they were in my house that week or not.

I had always planned to hand Carson his book on his sixteenth birthday. Old enough to understand it, young enough that it would still mean something. Brooke would get hers when she turned sixteen too.

After that phone call in May, I changed the plan.