No new car. The Malibu was still running, mostly. No trip. No new furniture. No new clothes except scrubs.
I put every dollar I didn’t need for rent and food into a savings account at the Iowa State Bank. The
same bank I used to clean on Sunday mornings.
By the end of that first year, I’d saved fourteen thousand dollars.
People asked me what it was for. Coworkers. My friend Kayla from nursing school.
“A down payment?” Kayla asked. “On a house?”Accept Payments
“Something like that,” I said.
I didn’t tell anybody. Not even Kayla.
Because every time I drove past Grandpa’s old eighty on the gravel road to Corning, I looked at it.
And every time, I saw the pond on the back corner. And the cottonwood. And the dam he built with a borrowed dozer.
And I thought about two girls on overturned buckets, with cane poles.
