The Account She Opened in Her Boots

Mrs Alcorn’s Window

The bank in our town is on the one real corner. It is a square brick building with a flag out front and a drop box for the farmers who bank after hours.

It has three teller windows. Usually two of them are closed.

We went on a Thursday, the day after. I did not tell Boyd and I did not tell Dale.

I did not want either of them to carry it for me. This one was mine to carry.

I put Katie in the truck in what she had on. That happened to be her show boots, the worn brown leather pair with the dust of the fairgrounds still in the stitching.

She had on a county 4-H t-shirt gone soft from washing. I did not dress her up.

I wanted her to walk in there exactly as what she was.

The teller was Mrs. Alcorn. I have known her since Katie was a baby.

She is somewhere in her sixties, reading glasses on a beaded chain. She has worked that window longer than I have been married.

She looked over the top of her glasses at the two of us. “Renee,” she said. “And who’s this young lady?”

“This is my daughter Katie,” I said. “She would like to open a savings account. Her own.”

Mrs. Alcorn looked at Katie, in her boots, up at the counter that came to her chin. Something passed over the woman’s face that I did not expect.

She set down the stamp she was holding. “Well,” she said. “Let’s get you set up properly.”

She came around to the little desk with the two chairs. She did not talk over Katie’s head to me, the way grown people do to children.

She talked to Katie. She slid the signature card across and she showed her where her name went.

She explained that because Katie was under eighteen I would be on the account as the custodian. That meant I was responsible for it.

“But it is your account and your money,” she told Katie. “And it stays that way until you’re grown.”

“Now I need you to sign right here,” Mrs. Alcorn said. “Your full legal name. The way you’ll sign it the rest of your life. So make it good.”

Katie stood up on her toes in those boots to reach the counter. She took the pen.

I had my hand on her shoulder. Her daddy was not there yet. I am telling it a little out of order on purpose.

She bit her lip the way she does over her homework. She wrote her whole name, Katherine Renee Dockery, in the careful cursive they still teach out here.

She made the K big. She underlined it without being told.

Her first try she pressed too hard and the pen skipped, and she looked up at Mrs. Alcorn, worried she had ruined it. Mrs. Alcorn just smiled and slid her a fresh card, and said the second signature is always the one that counts.

Katie did it again, slower, and this time it came out clean and sure. She looked at her own name sitting there on the line like she could not quite believe it was allowed to be there.

I have watched that girl walk a steer into a show ring in front of three hundred people. I have watched her stand up in church and read scripture in a clear voice.

But I do not think I have ever been as proud of her as I was right then. Up on her toes, in her dusty boots, her tongue between her teeth, signing her own name.

I put twelve hundred dollars into it. My freezer money.

Mrs. Alcorn counted it out loud so Katie could hear it. She printed the first deposit slip and slid it across.

“That’s yours now,” she said. “You keep that.”

Katie held the deposit slip in both hands like it was a baptism certificate.