It says:
PEOPLE LIKE YOU.
Farmers & Merchants Bank. Since 1968.
I’m eighty now.
I still go to the bank every Tuesday. I still wear my gardening clothes. George’s old hat. My green rubber boots.
Shelly still works the window. She asks about my roses.
The peppermint bowl is on the counter. Full.
And every Thursday, there’s a young man in jeans and a T-shirt and brown sneakers at the second window. People who don’t know him sometimes ask if the manager is in.
“I’m the manager,” he says.
Sometimes they believe him. Sometimes they don’t.
He always cashes their checks anyway.
Last month, a woman came in.
I was there. It was a Thursday. I’d stopped by to drop off some rhubarb for Shelly.
The woman was maybe forty. Thin. Tired. Wearing a gray uniform with a name patch that said CLEAN-PRO SERVICES. Rubber gloves sticking out of her back pocket. White sneakers with bleach stains on them.
