“I could drive over there and wait for him,” I said. “I could have it out with him this afternoon. I won’t, unless you want me to. I’d be going home tonight, and you’d be the one in this house with him.”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, please don’t.”
“Then I’m going to ask you one question, and you take as long as you need.” I squeezed her hand. “Do you want your own money, Mom?”
She did not answer for a long time. A truck went by on the gravel road and a little dust came drifting up past the window. Somewhere out in the yard a mourning dove was calling.
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“I stood on that concrete floor for thirty years,” she said at last. “I stood there when my back hurt and when my feet hurt and the winter your daddy was sick. I never missed a shift I didn’t have to miss.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I earned every dollar of that pension.” She picked her glasses back up and looked at the receipt again. “Every dollar.”
That was a yes.
We made the call the following Friday, from my own kitchen table in town. Mom had told Harlan she was coming in to help me can apples, which was true.
We canned apples all afternoon. But at nine o’clock that morning, with the coffee on and her retiree letter flattened out in front of her, she dialed the number at the top of the page herself.
I had written down what to say on an index card, but she did not need it. She gave the woman her name, her date of birth, the last four of her Social Security number, and the year she retired. Then she said, “I’d like to change where my pension goes.”
The woman on the other end was kind. I could hear her voice through the phone, a slow, patient voice, the voice of somebody who has talked to a lot of retired factory people. She asked whether Mom was making the change of her own free will, and Mom said, “Yes, ma’am, I surely am.”
The woman explained it all. She would mail out a direct deposit form and an address change form. Mom would sign them both and mail them back. Once a new bank account was on file, the money would go there every month.
“But I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Grote,” she said. “With the mail both ways, we won’t have a new account set up in time for October.”
Mom looked at me. I wrote on the index card: ask about a paper check.
“Could you mail me a paper check for October instead?” Mom said. “Until the bank part’s done?”
There was a little pause while the woman typed. “Yes, ma’am. If we have the forms back by the twentieth, we can stop the deposit and mail October as a paper check to your new address. Then you give your new bank the deposit form, and it starts again in November.”
“That’s fine,” Mom said. “Send it to my daughter’s house.”
She gave her my address on Clay Street, spelling out the numbers twice. When she hung up the phone, she put both hands flat on my kitchen table and let out a breath I think she had been holding for three years.
“Well,” she said. “That’s done.”