My grandson stood behind me at the register grinning while I counted my late wife’s pennies for $9.12 of bread, eggs and soup, because my card had just been declined. “Take your time, Pop,” he said. “Grandma ain’t gonna spend them.” Then the cashier looked up, straight at him, like she’d heard what he said to me first.
Joyce died in our house on Linden Street, in her chair by the front window. I mean to go the same way.
Those pennies were her Thursday money, in her mother’s leather coin purse. She paid for groceries out of it for sixty years.
I hadn’t opened that purse since the funeral.
Our daughter Denise called from Columbus every Sunday at six.
In April she sent her boy Kyle to move in and help.
By summer he’d brought papers to the kitchen table so he could pay my bills online. I signed where he pointed.
Then he had a truck. Then a white track jacket with a gold zipper.
I figured he’d found work.
Wednesday night he borrowed the sixty dollars he gave me every week for groceries. “Back tomorrow, Pop. Promise.”
Thursday he drove me to Shafer’s himself and steered me to Betty’s lane. He’d never cared whose lane.
Betty scanned the bread and the eggs and the soup. I put my card in.
DECLINED.
“Run it again, Earl,” Betty said.
Same word.
So I opened Joyce’s purse and counted her change onto the belt, one coin at a time. Somebody was paging a Dale to the deli.
Kyle leaned over my shoulder, put his elbow on the counter and his mouth by my ear.
“Card’s no good, Pop. I CALLED IT IN LOST yesterday. Savings too. Smile. People are watching.”
FORTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Joyce and I saved it ten dollars at a time. My thumb stopped on a penny.
Then he straightened up and said the Grandma part, loud enough for the whole line.
Betty looked up from the pennies.
She looked right past me at Kyle, and she kept looking. He was too busy grinning to notice.
I kept my fingers on the pennies and turned to look my grandson in the eye.
Sixty-nine cents
Kyle grinned back at me like the two of us were in on something.
I didn’t say a word to him. I stood watches off Cuba in 1962 while the whole world waited to see who’d blink. I wasn’t going to blink at a boy in a jacket I’d paid for.
Betty talked instead.
“Kyle.” She said it the way you call a dog off a chicken. “I’m standing right here, honey. I heard what you said in his ear.”
The grin stayed put. It just quit going anywhere.
“Family business, Betty,” he said. “Ring him up or don’t.”
“I’ll ring him up when he’s done counting. You go wait in your truck.”
He looked back down the line. The woman with the brown hair was looking at him, and so was the man in the gray shirt. Kyle laughed through his nose like it was a joke he was too tired to explain, and he went.
The automatic doors opened for him like he was anybody.
I finished counting. With the five Joyce always kept folded behind the change, it came to eight dollars and forty-three cents. Sixty-nine cents short.
I slid the soup back across the belt to her.
Betty slid it right back. She took a dollar out of her own shirt pocket, put it in the drawer and dropped thirty-one cents in my palm.
“Joyce would skin me,” she said. “Put that purse away, Earl.”
It took me two tries to get the snap shut.
She bagged my groceries herself and walked the sack around the end of the counter to me. Then she leaned in close, the way Kyle had, except she smelled like hand lotion instead of gum.
“Last Tuesday he came through with a case of those energy drinks and asked me if you’d been getting mixed up at the register,” she said. “I told him no. He asked me twice.”
“What’d he want to know that for?”
“I asked him the same thing. He said his mom was worried. Then he asked me to write it down for her, the next time you got confused.”
She looked out the window at Kyle’s truck, idling in the lot with the radio up.
“Earl, what does Denise need it in writing for?”
Her mother’s coin purse
That night I set Joyce’s purse on the kitchen table and turned it out. Brown leather, a brass snap, worn pale where a thumb goes. There was thirty-one cents in it and a bobby pin.
The purse was her mother’s first. Her mother sold eggs out of it on a farm outside Coshocton, and when Joyce married me in 1964 she brought the purse and the habit with her. Bills went in the bank. Change went in the purse, and the purse paid for Thursday. The purse was hers and the bank was mine.
We bought this house in 1966 for fourteen thousand five hundred dollars. I drove a county plow for thirty-six years, Joyce kept books at the feed store, and when we paid it off in 1991 we had a steak about it.
Joyce went through Betty’s lane every Thursday from the week Betty started at Shafer’s. When Joyce’s hip went, Betty carried her sacks out on her break, and she came to the funeral in her Shafer’s shirt, straight off a shift.
Denise is our only. She’s fifty-eight, divorced, with a condo in Columbus she was forever telling me the fees on. Marcy Doyle drew up our wills in 2019, and everything goes to Denise. Every Sunday call ended the same way. “Love you, Daddy. Eat something green.”
Kyle was twenty-seven and out of work when he came. He’d been a sweet kid. I taught him to fish at Dillon Lake. When he carried two duffel bags and a gaming chair into Denise’s old room, I was glad of the noise.
The iPad he’d set up for the Sunday calls sat on the counter by the bread box. It was on his own account, so he could fix it from his phone. He’d shown me how to save a picture of the screen by pushing two buttons at once. I’ve got forty pictures of my daughter in the middle of a word.
The papers he brought in June, I signed at this table, where Joyce did her crosswords. A girl he went to high school with came by with a notary stamp.
In August Denise drove down and took me to a specialist in Columbus. We left at five in the morning, no coffee. A young doctor named Haskins had me draw a clock and remember five words, and I got three. My VA doctor has seen me twice a year since 2019 and never once asked me to draw a clock.
After that, on Sundays, Denise started asking me what day it was. Laughing, like a game.
Kyle came in after eleven. He went down the hall without stopping at my door, and I heard the lock turn on Denise’s old room. His phone chimed through the wall till after one, the way it did most nights.
I put every lock in this house in myself. Nobody had ever turned one on me.
Account ending 4471
Friday morning I walked the six blocks to the credit union. I didn’t ask Kyle for a ride.
Gary Lutz runs the branch now. His dad plowed Route 16 beside me for twenty years, and Gary still calls me Mr. Bauer even though he’s got grandkids of his own. He took one look at me, walked me back to his office and shut the door.
I told him about the card. He typed for a while. Then he turned his screen around so I could see it, which I don’t believe he’s supposed to do.
Reported lost, Wednesday, 4:12 p.m., by phone. Kyle Ritter, agent under power of attorney.
“He’s got the authority, Mr. Bauer,” Gary said. “Far as the system goes, it’s the same as if you’d called it in yourself.”
Then he printed my statements. He kept printing. He had to get up and pull the pages off the machine in two handfuls.
Savings, February of last year, $41,212. Savings, this morning, $16.38.
In between were transfers to an account ending in 4471. Fifteen hundred, three thousand, eight hundred, two thousand, every few weeks for a year and a half. One in August of last year for $24,000, the same week the truck showed up in my driveway. And on my debit card, two weeks back, $189.99 at a sporting goods store in Zanesville.
I’d have guessed that jacket cost forty dollars.
“Whose account is 4471?” I said.
Gary didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
I asked him how you undo a power of attorney. He said you write it down. You say you revoke it, you sign it, and you get one copy to the bank and one to the person. Gary is a notary, so he got his stamp out of the drawer, and I wrote it out by hand on credit union paper while he waited.
I, Earl R. Bauer, revoke the power of attorney I gave Kyle Ritter. Effective today.
Joyce used to say my handwriting looked like a fence in a windstorm. Gary stamped it anyway. He made one copy for his file and one for me to hand Kyle, and he said he’d put a hold on anything anybody tried to do in my name.
“You’ll want a lawyer for the rest of it,” he said. “Marcy Doyle still does that kind of thing.”
“The rest of what?”
He took his glasses off. There was a bowl of butterscotch candy on his desk that I don’t believe anybody has ever taken one out of.
“Mr. Bauer, I wasn’t going to say anything, because you’re the account holder and she’s not. But Denise called here a week ago Monday wanting copies of your statements. I told her no.”
“What’d she want them for?”
“She said she’d be needing them for court.”
The woman with the folder
I walked home the long way, past the school, so I’d have time to work out what to say to Kyle. I never did work it out. I just handed him his copy at the kitchen table that afternoon, the way Gary said to.
He read it standing up. He read it twice. Then he folded it down to the size of a matchbook and put it in the pocket of the white jacket.
“You just made this a whole lot harder on yourself, Pop,” he said.
He packed the two duffel bags in about ten minutes and left the gaming chair. I heard the truck back out over the curb, the way I’d told him a hundred times not to. Then the house was as quiet as it had been in March.
Sunday at six I sat down at the counter with the iPad, the way I had for a year and a half of Sundays.
It never rang.
I called Denise’s cell four times between six and eight. Monday she picked up.
“Dad, Kyle told me everything,” she said, before I’d got two words out. “You gave him that money for the truck. You told me so yourself, on the phone, in August. You really don’t remember?”
“I never gave him a dime.”
“Daddy.” She went soft, like she was talking to somebody up on a roof. “This is exactly what I’ve been worried about.”
She had to go. She said she loved me. She didn’t tell me to eat something green.
Wednesday there was a knock at the front door.
A woman in a gray raincoat with a lanyard asked if I was Earl R. Bauer. Her name was Ms. Tran, she was an investigator for the county probate court, and could she come in and sit down, because she had some things to read me and it would take a while.
She read me my rights first. That’s how I knew how bad it was.
Then she asked me what day it was. I told her Wednesday the thirtieth, and that the Browns were going to lose on Sunday. She wrote something down. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t not smile either.
Then she handed me the folder. In the matter of the guardianship of Earl R. Bauer, age eighty-five, an alleged incompetent. Applicant, Denise Ritter, daughter.
Stapled to the back was a statement from Dr. Haskins in Columbus. Mild cognitive impairment. Not capable of managing his financial affairs. Guardianship of the person and the estate recommended.
On the second page, under property, somebody had typed my house. Linden Street, estimated value $168,000.
Ms. Tran explained it in plain words. If the magistrate signed off, Denise would decide where I lived and what got sold. The hearing was the nineteenth. I could be there. I could have a lawyer. I could get looked at by a doctor of my own choosing, and the court would read what that doctor said.
Then I turned to the part Denise had written herself.
Respondent frequently cannot state the day of the week.
Respondent reported his own debit card lost, then tried to use it at Shafer’s Market, could not pay for $9.12 in groceries, became confused and attempted to pay in pennies.
Under that, where it said persons with knowledge, there was one name, typed in capital letters.
BETTY NOVAK, CASHIER.
Sunday at six
The next Sunday I sat down at the counter at six anyway. Seventy-some Sundays in a row will do that to a man.
The iPad stayed dark. I was reaching to turn it face down when a gray box slid down from the top of the screen.
Mom: Did you delete all of it like I told you?
It was meant for Kyle. He’d set that iPad up on his own account, so whatever went to his phone came to my kitchen counter too. He’d never thought about that, and neither had I.
I touched the gray box the way he’d shown me to touch things. A page of little colored bubbles came up with Mom across the top, and I scrolled up with one finger. It went back a year and a half.
April, the week after Kyle moved in. Be sweet to him. Get the POA done by summer. Tell him it’s for the bills, he’ll sign anything if you call it the bills.
August. Haskins is the 14th. Have him up by 4:30. Don’t let him eat, he’s sharper after breakfast.
The Wednesday before Shafer’s, 11:20 in the morning. Call the card in lost today. Take whatever cash he’s got on him.
Then: Thursday 10am, Betty’s lane. She’s known them forever, the magistrate will believe her over anybody.
Then: Make sure people see it.
Thursday, 10:41, from Kyle. lmao hes counting grandmas pennies. betty saw the whole thing
Denise, a minute later. Good. Don’t be an ass about it.
The Friday after, from Denise. Is the money still in your account? Don’t touch it. That’s January.
Kyle. its fine
I read all of it twice. My coffee went cold by my hand. Somewhere in there I’d let go of the counter and taken hold of the iPad with both hands, like it might get away from me.
Then the screen moved on its own. A blue bubble came up at the bottom, from Kyle’s phone, wherever he was.
yeah. all of its gone
He meant the messages, I figured.
I pushed the two buttons at once, the way he’d taught me so I could keep my daughter’s face. I did it thirty-one times, one screen at a time, all the way back up to April. Then I laid the iPad face down by the bread box and picked up the phone on the wall.
Betty answered on the fourth ring. There was a TV going behind her.
“Betty, it’s Earl Bauer. I’m sorry to call you at home.”
“I wondered when you would.” The TV went quiet. “A lady from the court called me Friday. Earl, I never told your daughter one thing about you. Not ever.”
“I know it. I need to ask you something. What did he say to me, in my ear? I need it word for word.”
“I don’t have to remember it, Earl.”
“Why not?”
“Kyle asked me to write it down the next time you got confused. So I wrote it down at 10:43 that morning, on the back of a register tape.” She stopped a second. “I just didn’t write down what he wanted.”
The kitchen table
Monday I walked the iPad down to Marcy Doyle’s office on Main. Marcy is seventy-one and wears tennis shoes with her suits. She went through all thirty-one pictures without a word, then had her girl print two sets and lock one in the safe.
She filed my objection that afternoon and asked the court for the second doctor. Wednesday my VA doctor gave me the same test Haskins had, at two in the afternoon, after lunch. I got twenty-eight out of thirty. She put it in a letter and added that she’d take my blood pressure any day of the week.
Friday night I called Denise.
“I’m tired, honey,” I said. “Bring whatever you need me to sign. Come tomorrow, and bring Kyle. His chair’s still here.”
It was the first lie I’d told my daughter since the dog went to live on a farm.
They came at ten, Denise in her car and Kyle behind her in the truck. She had a folder from her lawyer and a box of the cinnamon donuts I like. He had the white jacket on.
Denise stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Betty was at the table in her church coat, with her purse on her lap. In front of my place I had five things in a row. Gary’s printout. My revocation. The VA letter. Marcy’s thirty-one pages. A curl of register tape about as long as my hand.
“What is she doing here?” Denise said. “Dad, this is family.”
“Sit down, Denise.”
She sat. Then she talked, fast and organized, the way her mother did when she was scared. She said I’d given Kyle that money and forgot. She said Gary had no business. She said the VA would pass a houseplant. She said the house was coming to her anyway, so what was the difference, and she was only doing this because somebody had to and she was the one who loved me.
I slid Marcy’s pages across the table.
She read the first one and the second one, and her face did something I hadn’t seen it do since she was fourteen and I found the cigarettes in her coat. Then she turned around in her chair.
“I told you to delete those,” she said to Kyle.
“I did delete them.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Kyle looked at the iPad by the bread box like it had bit him.
Betty unrolled her tape and read it out in her register voice, the one she uses to tell you your total.
“Ten forty-three a.m. Kyle Ritter, in Earl’s ear. Card’s no good, Pop. I called it in lost yesterday. Savings too. Smile. People are watching.”
“She’s making that up,” Kyle said.
“I’ve rung up your family since you rode in the cart, Kyle,” Betty said. “I don’t make things up for a living.”
“You’re a cashier,” Denise said. “I’ll call Shafer’s Monday morning and you’ll be done there.”
“Mr. Shafer’s mother came through my lane every Wednesday for nineteen years, hon. You go ahead and call him.”
“Marcy takes all of this to the magistrate on the nineteenth,” I said. “Or your lawyer calls her Monday and pulls the application.”
That was the most I said all morning.
Denise looked at the pages a long time. Then she put both hands flat on her folder.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. Kyle and I put the money back, and then we all just—”
“Mom,” Kyle said. “The money’s gone.”
She looked at him.
He took his phone out, opened something green with numbers all down it and laid it face up on the table, next to the donuts. I don’t know how those things work. I know what a column of red looks like. I’d been hearing it through his door every night since spring, a little chime and Kyle saying come on, come on.
“That was January,” Denise said. “That was my condo.” She said it to him. She didn’t look at me once. “Do you understand what you did? That money was MINE.”
“You said he’d be in a home by Christmas anyway,” Kyle said.
Betty set her tape down on the table very carefully, like it might go off.
I turned Gary’s printout to the August page and put it in front of Kyle with my finger on the $24,000.
“The truck,” I said.
“It’s my truck.”
“Give him the keys, Kyle,” Denise said. She still hadn’t looked at me.
He dug them out of the white jacket and set them down on Marcy’s pages.
Denise stood up with her folder. She buttoned her coat wrong and didn’t fix it.
“If you go through with this,” she said, “you don’t have a daughter.”
I didn’t answer her.
She went out first. Kyle went out after her and got in her car. The storm door eased shut behind them on its arm.
Thursday
Marcy called Monday afternoon. Denise’s lawyer had pulled the application at nine that morning. There wasn’t going to be a nineteenth.
Kyle came to Gary’s desk that same day and signed the truck title over in front of the stamp. He never looked up. A dealer in Zanesville came and got the truck and gave me $19,500 for it. The rest, about twenty-one thousand dollars, is a column of red on a phone somewhere. Marcy says there are things we could still do about that. I told her to let it go.
Sundays at six I still sit down at the counter. The iPad lives in the drawer under the bread box now. The gaming chair went out to the curb with a sign on it, and it was gone inside an hour.
Thursday I walked to Shafer’s. Bread, eggs and a can of soup. Betty’s lane.
My new card went through the first time. Betty handed me the receipt and then she waited, because she knows me.
I got out Joyce’s purse and opened the snap. It had taken me all week to save sixty-nine pennies in it. I counted them onto the belt, one at a time.
The man behind me had a gallon of milk and somewhere to be. He set the milk down on the belt and waited.
Betty didn’t help me count. She stood with her hand flat on the counter, the way she’d stood that other Thursday, and let me do it.
“Take your time, Earl,” she said.
If there’s an old man in your life who still pays in change, send this to somebody who’ll stand in line with him.
For another painful moment when a declined card exposes a family betrayal, read “My Husband’s Truck Was Idling in the Lot While She Held Up My Card”. And when family turns a home into a battleground, there’s “My Mother Sold Dad’s House While I Was Stuck on the Ice” and “My Sister Brought Two Suitcases to My Lake House. Her Husband Brought a Deed.”.
