Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
“It’s still partly my account, Kaitlyn,” my mother-in-law said, and she set her coffee cup down on the saucer so gently it didn’t even click. “My name has been on it since Nathan was sixteen.”
I was standing in her kitchen with my car keys still in my hand.
I had come straight over after supper, while Nate gave the kids their baths, because I did not want to have this conversation over the phone.
“Linda,” I said, “that was our rent. Eight hundred and fifty dollars of it, anyway. And Nate’s whole paycheck. You took twenty-seven hundred dollars out of our checking account on Tuesday.”
“I know what I took.” She folded her dish towel in thirds and laid it over the oven handle, the way she always did. “I’ll put it back when I can. You two will manage. You always manage.”
That was the part that stuck in me like a splinter. You always manage.
As if managing was something we did for fun, as if the money in that account had grown there on its own.
“When is when you can?” I asked.
“Soon.” She would not look at me. She looked at the window over the sink, where it was already dark at six thirty, the way it is in central Kansas at the end of January. “Friday, most likely. Don’t make a federal case out of it.”
I want to say I said something sharp. I didn’t. I said, “Okay, Linda,” and I went home and sat in the van in our driveway for ten minutes with the engine running and the heater blowing, because I did not want my children to see my face yet.
My name is Kaitlyn Shaw. I was twenty-nine that winter.
I teach the three-year-olds at the little daycare on Main Street, the one in the old Methodist parsonage, and I married Nate Shaw when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four.
Nate works at the grain elevator at the edge of town.
He has worked there, off and on, since he was sixteen years old, sweeping out bins and running the probe on the trucks at harvest.
Now he runs the leg and the loadout and does a little of everything.
That first paycheck from the elevator is how the account got started. Nate was sixteen and the bank would not open a checking account for a minor without an adult on it.
So his mother walked him into Farmers State Bank and signed the card right beside him.
That was fifteen years ago. Nobody ever thought about it again. When Nate and I got married, I added myself to it, and somehow nobody thought to take Linda off.
It was just the account. Our paychecks went in. Our rent and the light bill and the daycare payment came out.
Linda never touched it. Not once in seven years of marriage.
I don’t think either of us remembered her name was still on the card until I opened the banking app on Tuesday night to pay the rent and saw four hundred and forty dollars where three thousand one hundred and forty should have been.
The line said Withdrawal, Counter, and the amount. Twenty-seven hundred dollars even.
I called Nate into the bedroom and showed him the phone, and I watched him go from confused to understanding in about the time it takes to say it.
“Mom,” he said. Not a question. Just the word.
The next morning I called the bank on my lunch break while my three-year-olds were down for their naps.