The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

The payment slip was sitting next to the salt shaker when I got home from the salon that Tuesday in February. Avery had smoothed it flat with both hands the way she does with anything that matters to her.

“Final balance due Friday,” it said, in Mrs. Hollis’s neat teacher printing across the bottom. “Three thousand dollars. Washington, June 7 through 12. Please make checks to the tour company, not the school.”

Avery was fourteen and in the eighth grade, and she had been waiting for that slip since the sixth.

She had a list on the refrigerator of everything she wanted to see, and the Lincoln Memorial was at the top in purple marker.

“Can we do it tonight?” she asked me. “Mrs. Hollis said the people who pay early get their roommate picks first. I want to room with Emily and Kaylee.”

I said sure. I sat down at the kitchen table still in my work smock, with hair clippings on my sleeves, and opened the bank app on my phone to move her money over so I could write the check.

The savings balance said forty-one dollars and twelve cents.

I looked at it for a long time. I closed the app and opened it again, because that is what you do when a number cannot be right. It said forty-one dollars and twelve cents the second time too.

There should have been three thousand two hundred and some change in there. I knew that number the way I know my own phone number.

Avery checked it every Sunday night and told me how much it had grown from interest, which was usually about four cents.

“Mom?” Avery said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, honey,” I said, and that was the first lie I told about it. “The app is being slow. I’ll call the bank in the morning and get it sorted out.”

She went back to her homework. I scrolled down through the history with my thumb, and there it was, eight days earlier, a single withdrawal at the counter of our branch in town. Three thousand one hundred and sixty dollars. Teller transaction.

There were only two names on that account. One was mine. The other was my husband’s.

I called the bank at eight the next morning from the back room of the salon, between a perm and a color.

I knew the woman who answered. Her name was Pam, and I had cut her hair for eleven years.

Pam was kind about it. She looked it up while I waited, and then she got quiet, and then she told me what I already knew.

Kevin had come in on a Monday, filled out a withdrawal slip, and shown his license.

“Shannon, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s a joint account. Any owner on it can take out any amount. There’s nothing on our side that says it was hers. To us, it’s a family matter.”

Here is my part, and I will say it plainly because I have had a lot of time to think about it.

When Kevin and I got married six years ago, we merged everything into one checking and one savings at the bank in town, because a separate account for a child cost a monthly fee if the balance dropped under three hundred dollars.

So Avery’s money went into our household savings. I nicknamed it in the app. “Avery Trip.” I thought a nickname was the same as a lock. It is not, and I know that now.