“It still works fine, Karen.”
My husband said it standing in our driveway on a Saturday afternoon in late April. His hand was resting on the side of a bass boat that had not been there when I left for the grocery store.
It was green and silver metal flake. The kind that sparkles like a bowling ball under the lights at the alley. There was a 150 Mercury motor hung on the back of it, and a trailer underneath with one tire lower than the other.
I had a gallon of milk in one hand and a ten-pound sack of potatoes in the other.
I just stood there holding them. I didn’t know where else to put them.
“What works fine?” I said.
“The kitchen.”
Rick didn’t look at me. He looked at the boat.
“The cabinets close. The stove heats. My mother cooked on worse for forty years.”
That was when I understood exactly where the money had come from.
My name is Karen Schmitz. I’m fifty-three years old. I’ve been a teller at the First State Bank in Cambridge, Iowa, for twenty-two years.
And for six years, I put forty dollars a week from my paycheck into a savings account we called the kitchen account.
Forty dollars. Every single Friday. I set it up as an automatic transfer so I couldn’t talk myself out of it.
Some weeks I had to move the money back out. The fall Tyler was twenty and his transmission went. The winter the water heater died and flooded the basement. But I always caught it back up.
By that April, the balance sat at eleven thousand and twelve dollars.
I knew the number because I’m a bank teller. I count other people’s money for a living. And I’d counted mine every Friday on my lunch break for six years. Sitting in my car in the bank parking lot with a ham sandwich, looking at that number on my phone.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
