The Statement at Grandma’s Birthday Supper

You cannot open a joint account for somebody without them standing there, and I would not have wanted to. Grandma took her driver’s license out of the little coin purse she carries, the one she renews every few years even though she hasn’t driven at night since Grandpa died.

The woman at the new accounts desk was named Pam. She had been two years ahead of me in school, and her mother and my mother had been in 4-H together. She did not ask any questions she didn’t need to ask.

She checked both our IDs and ran the paperwork. She asked Grandma if she understood that either of us could write on the account, and Grandma said, “I understand it better than you’d think, Pamela.”

Then Grandma signed the card. Opal M. Brandt, in the same slow, careful hand she has written on every birthday card I have ever gotten from her. It took her a while. Pam waited, and so did I.

I made the opening deposit of three hundred dollars out of my own wallet in cash, because I had stopped at the ATM by the grain elevator on the way in.

Then, sitting right there at Pam’s desk with my phone, I went into my own bank’s app and changed the monthly transfer. The money that had gone to my brother’s account for two years would go, starting November first, to the new account in Grandma’s name and mine.

“Pam,” I said, “could I ask one more favor? I need something printed.”

I emailed her the transfer history from my bank’s website. Every transfer from my checking account to Jeremy’s, starting in November two years ago, right through the first of this month. Twenty-four lines. Three hundred dollars each. Every memo the same word.

Pam printed it on the bank’s printer and handed it to me without reading it, which I appreciated more than I can say. Then she printed the account summary for the new account, the one with both our names across the top and a single line underneath: opening deposit, three hundred dollars.

I folded the three pages together and put them in an envelope from her desk.

The drugstore is two doors down from the bank, with the pharmacy counter in the back past the greeting cards. The pharmacist is a man named Dale who has been filling Grandma’s prescriptions since before I was born.

I asked him to fill her heart pill. He looked it up on the computer and frowned.

“She’s only been filling it every other month since spring,” he said. “I wondered about that.”

“She’s been cutting them in half,” I said quietly, so the woman by the cough syrup wouldn’t hear. “Since March.”

Dale took his glasses off and looked at Grandma over the counter. “Opal,” he said, gently. “You know better than that.”

“I know a lot of things,” Grandma said. “Knowing them doesn’t pay for them.”

“What does she owe on a full bottle?” I asked.

“Seventy-one dollars, after her insurance.”

I put my debit card on the counter. Dale counted out the pills and put the bottle in a white paper bag, and before he handed it over, he leaned toward Grandma.

“Whole ones,” he said. “Not halves. That one isn’t meant to be split, and your doctor wrote that dose for a reason.”

“I heard you, Dale.”

“I’m going to call and ask you on Thursday,” he said, “and you better tell me the truth.”

On the way back to the car she held the paper bag on her lap with both hands, like it was something that might get away.