Account Number 0001
I went to the bank in my gardening clothes.
That was my first mistake, I suppose.
It was a Tuesday in June. Hot already by ten in the morning. The kind of hot that comes up out of the ground in Millbrook and sits on your shoulders like a wet towel.
I’d been in the tomatoes all morning. Tying up the Better Boys and pinching the suckers off the Romas. Dirt on my knees. Dirt under my fingernails. Dirt, probably, on the end of my nose.
I had on George’s old straw hat. The one with the frayed brim and the sweat stain around the band that’s been there since the Carter administration. My blue work shirt with the patches on the elbows. My good rubber boots. The green ones.
The check was from the Methodist church.
Forty dollars. For four rhubarb pies for the bake sale. Reverend Collins had brought it by the house himself on Sunday afternoon and stood on my porch insisting I take it.
“Dot, you’ve been giving us pies for free for forty years,” he said. “Let us pay you once.”
So I took it. And Tuesday morning, after the tomatoes, I walked the four blocks down Main Street to cash it.
I’ve been banking at Farmers & Merchants in Millbrook for fifty-eight years.
I didn’t think twice.
The bank is a little red brick building on the corner of Main and Second. Two stories. White columns out front that George always said were too fancy for a town of four thousand people. A brass plaque by the door that says FARMERS & MERCHANTS BANK — EST. 1968.
Inside, it smells like old carpet and new money and the peppermints they keep in a glass bowl on the counter.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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