The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

The card was declined at Bixler’s Pharmacy on a Tuesday morning in late October, and Gail behind the counter would not look at me.

“Try it again, honey,” I said, because I could not see the little screen and she could.

She tried it again. I heard the machine make the sound it makes, one flat note, like a hymn that has lost its place. Gail said it was thirty-eight dollars and seventy cents, that it was my heart pills, and that she could set them aside until tomorrow.

There were people in line behind me. I know because I heard their shoes shift on the tile. I have not been able to make out a face in two years, only the gray place where a face used to be.

“Set them aside,” I said. “I will straighten it out.”

I have never in seventy-nine years had a card turned down. I thanked Gail, which is a foolish thing to do, and I found the door with the back of my hand.

Forty-One Steps

The bank is across Main Street and forty-one steps from the pharmacy door if you cross at the corner by the flagpole. I know the number because I counted it that morning, and I counted it every time after.

My name is Lloyd Eshelman. I live on the same sixty acres outside Rexford, Pennsylvania, in Perry County, where I was born. I milked sixty Holsteins on that farm for thirty-eight years, until my knees and the milk prices talked me into selling the herd.

The door of Perry Valley Savings has a brass handle worn smooth by about a hundred years of farmers. I pushed through it with my heart going harder than a man my age should allow.

“Lloyd?”

I knew the voice. Pauline Strawser has managed that branch for twenty-two years. She taught Sunday school to my granddaughter. She sat two pews behind us at Marjorie’s funeral and sent a pound cake the next morning.

“They turned my card down at the pharmacy,” I said. “I think there is some mistake.”

There was a pause. It was a little too long.

“Come back to my office,” Pauline said. “I will bring you a cup of coffee.”

I heard her cross the lobby, and I heard something I had never heard in all my years of banking there. I heard the click of her office door being closed.

What Marjorie Did

My wife kept the books for fifty-one years. Marjorie wrote every check in blue ink in a green clothbound ledger the Rexford Farmers Co-op gave out at the annual dinner. She knew what the milk check was and what the feed bill would be, and she knew to the dollar what we could spare for the church roof.

I knew how to run a barn and how to read a sky. In fifty-one years I never wrote a check without her at my elbow saying, “Lloyd, it goes on the line.”

She died in March of 2022. A stroke in the kitchen, with a dish towel in her hand. There was one month of casseroles and then there was the checkbook, sitting on the counter, and me staring at it like a locked gate.

Then my eyes started to go. Wet macular degeneration, the retina doctor in Harrisburg called it. He puts a needle in my eye every six weeks to slow it down. I can see the edges of the world but not the middle, and I cannot read print smaller than a newspaper headline, even with the magnifier Josie bought me.

That was when my son said, “Dad, let me help.”