“Mom,” my daughter said, in a voice I hadn’t heard since she was nine and broke my mother’s cut-glass bowl. “Please don’t hang up.”
Those weren’t the four words that changed everything. Those came eleven seconds later, after the bank manager laid his pen on his desk very softly, as if the sound might scare something away. I counted the seconds on the wall clock above his diploma.
“It was my idea,” Karen said.
I was sitting in a leather chair in the manager’s office at the First Miami Valley Bank branch on Kemp Road in Dayton, Ohio. The phone was on speaker on the desk in front of me. A young teller stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.
My name is Eleanor Lane. I’m eighty years old, and I’ve banked at that branch since March 2nd, 1971. That was the day my husband, Harold, and I opened a joint savings account with forty dollars and promised the teller we’d never bounce a check.
We never did.
Harold taught shop class at Fairmont High School for thirty-four years. He died six years ago of a stroke, out in the garden, with a tomato in his hand. He left me our house on Alder Street, which we paid off in 1994, a small teacher’s pension, and a $140,000 life insurance policy through the school district.
I put the insurance money in a savings account. I added a little to it every month and never touched it. That was our rule. The principal was for emergencies and for our grandsons.
At the end of last October, the balance was $87,412.18. I know that number the way I know my own phone number. I’ve written our balance in a green ledger every first Monday of the month, at the kitchen table, in pencil, for fifty-three years.
On Thursday, October 19th, I found out that a woman wearing my coat had walked into my bank and taken sixty-one thousand dollars of it.
The teller in the doorway was Brittany. She’s twenty-six, a cheerful girl with braces and a gift for remembering names. She’d waited on me for six years. Over three weeks, she counted out three withdrawals to a woman she thought was me.
On the last visit, the Monday before, Brittany had smiled and asked, “Having a nice week, Mrs. Lane?”
And the woman said, “Lovely, dear.”
“I’m so sorry,” Brittany whispered now. “She knew your birthday. She knew your mother’s maiden name. She knew about your cat.”
“Pickles,” I said.
“She said Pickles had been sick.”
“He was.”
I’d told Karen. Three weeks earlier, on the phone.
