The Pension Check Mom Cashed Herself

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll need your driver’s license, honey.”

Mom took it out of her billfold and slid it across. Mrs. Ferris typed for a while, the old way, two fingers, reading the screen. Then the printer behind her hummed and pushed out three pages.

She laid them on the wood counter, turned them around so they faced Mom, and handed her a pen.

“Just where the little flags are,” she said.

I stood one step back. I had decided that on the drive in. This was not mine to do.

It was not my money, it was not my name, and it was not my thirty years on the concrete floor. All I had done was find out. Everything after that was hers.

Mom signed every line. Slow and even, every letter the same height. When she was done, she laid the pen down beside the papers, square to the edge of the counter, the way she lays her scissors down.

“Now,” Mrs. Ferris said. “What would you like to put in it?”

Mom opened the envelope. She took out the check and looked at it for a long moment, at her own name printed there and the amount, $1,140.00, and the little line that said what it was for.

I think it was the first time in three years she had seen it.

Then she turned it over and signed the back.

“I’d like to deposit this,” she said. “But I’d like some of it in cash, please. Four hundred.”

“Four hundred back,” Mrs. Ferris said, and wrote it on the slip.

She ran the check through her machine. She stamped the slip. She opened her drawer and began to count.

She did it the old way, out loud and slow, laying each bill down into Mom’s open hand instead of on the counter. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred.” A pause. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred.”

My mother’s hand was shaking a little. She was smiling anyway. It was not a big smile. It was the small, private smile she used to get when she finished a hard pair of boots and turned them over and the seam was perfect.

Before Mrs. Ferris could finish, Mom said something I will never forget.

“Odile,” she said. “Could I have one of those as a hundred? A new one, if you’ve got it. A crisp one.”

Mrs. Ferris looked at her for a second. Then she went back into her drawer, flipped past a few bills, and drew out one hundred-dollar bill so new it still had a little curl in it from the strap.

“Here’s your crisp one,” she said, and laid it on top.

Mom held it up to the window. The sun came right through it. She looked at it the way I have seen girls at the county fair look at a blue ribbon.

Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and tucked it into the little coin purse inside her pocketbook, the same coin purse she had counted dimes out of at my counter, and snapped it shut.

“There,” she said, mostly to herself.

That was when the front door opened behind us.

I knew it was him before I turned around. You know the walk of a man you have watched cross a carport for fifteen years. The floor creaked in the same spot it always creaks, just inside the door, and then it stopped.