The Loan I Never Told Her About

The Barber

Cliff came to the bank on the fifteenth of every month for eleven years and nine months. He wore a clean shirt and his good hat. He sat in the chair in front of my desk and wrote a check for $376, and he handed it to me by hand, and I stamped the receipt. He did not mail it. I asked him once why he drove twenty-two miles to do what a stamp could do, and he said, “I like to look at the man who has my name in his drawer.”

We talked. That is what I did not expect, and what I would give a good deal to get back. We talked for twenty minutes every month. He asked about Kinsley, who was a baby, then a first grader, then a girl with a missing front tooth. I asked about the booth. He told me about the cooling fans and the lamp that cost eleven hundred dollars, and about the night in 2016 when the server crashed in the middle of a Saturday picture and he ran down the ladder, which is a thing, he said, that a man of sixty-four should not do, and restarted the machine in four minutes with the whole house sitting in the dark, and not one person in the seats got up.

And every month, when he stood up to go, he shook my hand and said, “Tell Penny the barber says hello.”

I said, “Cliff, you don’t go to a barber.”

“Pearline thinks I do,” he said.

I need you to understand this about him. The man had been bald since 1994. For eleven years and nine months, a woman who kept the books of a picture show and knew the price of a case of popcorn oil to the penny believed her husband was getting a haircut every month in Walsburg, and she never once asked him why it took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I have thought about that a great deal. I think she knew he had somewhere to be, and I think she had decided to let him have it. That is the sort of marriage it was.

In 2020 she asked him straight out, at the kitchen table, how much was left on the machine. I know because he told me about it on the fifteenth. He said, “I told her it’s about paid, Kent.” He looked at his hat. “It was about thirty-one thousand.”

I did not like it. I said so. He said, “She had the funeral for her mother that year, and the virus, and the picture house shut for four months. I wasn’t going to put one more number on her.” He added, “She is going to be fine. I will see it through.” He said that to me for another five years. I believed him. I believed him on the fifteenth of August of 2025, the last time he sat in that chair, when he handed me his check and said Kinsley was going to be taller than her mother.

He died on the ninth of September.