Sixteen Years of Fridays at the Bank

What Darren said

He did not say it angry. That was the thing. He said it like a joke, the way men say things they mean when they want to be able to take them back.

“Must be nice,” he said, loud enough for the table and the lawn chairs. “Somebody else pays the bills, and the fun dad gets to buy the cake.”

Nobody laughed. My mother set down her paper plate very slowly. Ron looked at the grass. Angie turned and looked at her husband with an expression I had never seen on her before.

Carson stopped with his breath held over the candles. Brooke did not look at Darren. She looked straight at me.

That was the look I had seen in the back window of the Equinox in May. Thirteen years old, waiting to find out if she was a bill.

I did not answer him. I did not look at him, if I am honest, because I did not trust my face.

“Hang on, bud,” I told Carson, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t blow those out yet. Give me one minute.”

I went in the house. The two passbooks were in a cigar box on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, behind my winter hats. I had taken them to the bank the day before, for the last Friday stamp, and put them back.

My hands were not quite steady when I picked them up. I stood in my bedroom a second. Then I walked back out into the sun.

The passbooks

I set one passbook on the table in front of Carson. I set the other in front of Brooke. They were small and cream colored and soft at the corners, the way paper gets after sixteen years of Fridays.

“What’s this?” Carson asked.

“Your birthday present,” I said. Then I looked at Brooke. “Yours is early, Bug. I couldn’t do one without the other.”

Carson picked his up and opened the front cover. A deposit slip slid out and landed on the table next to the cake, folded so many times it had gone soft as a dish towel.

He unfolded it. I watched him read it. My handwriting, younger than I remembered it. His name. The date he was born. Twenty dollars. And across the top, “Carson, day one.”

He did not say anything. He just held it. Sixteen-year-old boys do not cry at picnic tables in front of their grandparents, so he held very still instead, which is how the men in my family have always done it.

Brooke opened hers. Her slip was there too. Twenty dollars. “Brooke, day one.” She put her hand flat over it on the table like it might blow away.