The Pension Check Mom Cashed Herself

He stood there by the deposit slips with his bank book and his red face, a seventy-six-year-old man who had driven a truck for forty years and never once been late on a load, and everybody in that lobby knew exactly what he had done.

I had thought, on all those afternoons I drove out to that house, that I would feel glad when this moment came. I did not feel glad. I felt sad for him, and a little sick, and very proud of my mother. That was all.

Mrs. Ferris cleared her throat softly. “Wilhelmina, while you’re here,” she said, in her ordinary teller voice, “let’s fill out that deposit form for the pension office, so November comes straight to your new account.”

“Yes,” Mom said, turning back to the window. “Let’s do that.”

And she did. She stood there with her back to Harlan and filled in her new account number on the pension office form while Mrs. Ferris read it off the screen to her, two digits at a time.

She signed it. Mrs. Ferris put it in an envelope and said she would fax a copy for her that morning and mail the original herself.

When Mom turned around again, the door was swinging shut. Harlan had gone.

Georgette came back across the lobby and put her arms around my mother and held her for a second without a word.

Then she patted Mom’s cheek, the way you would a girl’s, and went out. Through the big front windows I saw Amos on the steps lift his cap to her as she passed.

“Well,” Mom said. She put the rest of the bills in her billfold and buckled her pocketbook shut. “I think I need to go to the drugstore.”

“You’ve already got your pill, Mom. I paid for it.”

“I know you did. I’m going to pay you back.” She looked at me. “And I’d like to pick up my refill for next month while I’m at it. With my own money. From my own daughter.”

I had to look away for a second. Out the window, the maples on the courthouse lawn were moving in the wind, and the sun was so bright on the bricks across the street that it hurt to look at.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll ring you up myself.”

I dropped her at home at a quarter to eleven so I could make my shift. Harlan’s truck was not in the carport. She said she was fine. She said she would make herself some lunch and maybe lie down.

I asked her three times if she wanted to come stay with us for a few days. She said no all three times.

“It’s my house too,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. He can go sit at the boat if he wants to. He’ll find he’s got less to sit there with.”

At two o’clock that afternoon, my mother walked into my pharmacy in her mint-green coat. She waited her turn behind a young mother with a baby on her hip.

When she got to my counter, she took out her new billfold and counted out forty-seven dollars for her refill, and forty-seven more for the one I had paid for, and laid it all on the tray.

“There,” she said. “We’re square.”

“Mom, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to.” She snapped the billfold shut. “Now, is that shoe store on Ohio still open on Mondays?”

It was. I took my late lunch, and we walked over together in the afternoon sun.