The first card was declined at the grocery store on a Tuesday morning, which is the kind of day these things happen, not on a dramatic Friday evening or a charged holiday but on an ordinary Tuesday when you are standing in line behind a woman buying bananas and a man returning a watermelon and the cashier is a teenager who does not yet know how to make the moment less humiliating for the sixty three year old woman whose card has just been rejected in front of eleven strangers. I smiled at the boy. “Try it again, please.”
He swiped it again.
Declined. “Do you have another form of payment?” he asked, and to his credit he said it quietly, leaning forward slightly, giving me the small mercy of reduced volume. I pulled out my debit card.
The one attached to the household account Warren and I had maintained for twenty eight years, the account that had survived two recessions, three market corrections, a pandemic, the birth and raising of two children, and the five years since my husband died in the garden on a Saturday afternoon while I was inside making the lemonade he had asked for and would never drink. Declined. I felt the line behind me shift.
Not with cruelty exactly. With the particular discomfort Americans feel when witnessing someone else’s financial failure in public, the averted eyes, the studied interest in magazine racks, the phone screens that suddenly require urgent attention. “One more,” I said, and I retrieved the emergency American Express from the inside pocket of my wallet, the card I had carried for nearly three decades and used perhaps a dozen times, always for genuine emergencies, never frivolously, never irresponsibly.
Warren used to call it the parachute. “You never pull it unless the plane is going down,” he told me the day we received it, and I had honored that principle through every year of our marriage and every year of my widowhood. Declined.
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