josh barnett – errands

My retired father-in-law got a job as a bank teller. A former executive at our town’s largest insurance firm, he obviously missed the give-and-take of the professional world. 

He said he wanted to do something that mattered and that the exchange of money had real weight, with material importance on people’s lives. I don’t think he realized how much banking is done online now.

The job was much less social and much more menial than he had hoped for. He was coming home tired, anxious, and agitated. This, in turn, made my mother-in-law, who’d been fantasizing about her newfound time alone, anxious and agitated herself. It also presented obvious problems for my wife, as both of her parents would spend hours on the phone complaining about the other to her.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and visit my father-in-law at work to try and cheer him up. I was going to open a checking account with him. The bulk of it would likely have to happen with one of his managers, but I would talk him up as a friendly, helpful go-getter, who could certainly take on more responsibility, like working in the vault, a duty he coveted.

I had pictured all of this happening right up until I was next in line, when I suddenly remembered that I couldn’t open a checking account. My wife was in charge of all of our finances, an arrangement I had happily agreed to in the wake of some poor financial decisions I’d made in my late twenties. As such, I didn’t have access to any of the pertinent details needed to open a new checking account, nor any money to deposit.

I looked at my father-in-law’s glassy eyes as a frustrated woman in her forties stuffed a stack of twenties into her wallet and began to walk away from the teller window.

I didn’t know what to do, so I panicked, and held my hand inside my jacket as if I were concealing a gun.

By the time my father-in-law called “next customer,” I knew I’d made an unforced error—I didn’t need to have business to conduct in order to visit him, I simply could have told him something like, say, he’d left his wristwatch on top of our toilet tank during our last Sunday dinner, and that my wife had asked me to drop it off to him. Incidentally, this was true—my wife had asked me to drop off his wristwatch and it was in my back pocket at that very moment.

Unfortunately, in the time between when I stuck my hand in my jacket and when I stepped up to the window, the security guard had seen my hand-gun and must have assumed it was an actual handgun, because he stood up from his stool and put his hand on his own gun.

In that brief moment, I saw how genuinely surprised and happy my father-in-law was to see me: I didn’t even need the pretense of the forgotten wristwatch—a simple, friendly chat would have been enough to break through the monotony of his workday.

Alright you old fuck, I shouted. Hands where I can see them. 

Son, what are you doing? My father-in-law was understandably confused and clearly mortified. I was a bit confused too—he had never called me son before. 

I felt dangerously close to losing the only advantage I had: the element of surprise. I needed to ratchet things up if I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of my father-in-law and the rest of the people in the bank.

Drop your gun and kick it over to me, I directed the security guard. Or the liver-spotted bald fuck is going to get his insides sprayed against the wall. 

A woman screamed. The security guard did as he was told.

I’d gained one of the few advantages more useful to a bank robber than surprise: a gun.

Cool, I said. 

I pointed the gun at my father-in-law and asked for $32,000 in non-sequential bills. 

Notably, I had asked him for this exact amount of money early on in my marriage, as a start-up loan for a business idea one of my old college roommates had. He declined, wisely, as my wife had told him, correctly, that I was not good with money. 

My father-in-law kept staring at me, bewildered. I realized that, actually, I hadn’t said “non-sequential bills,” I’d said “non-denominational bills” by mistake. I feared I had once again lost the upper hand, as everyone, including my father-in-law, now surely saw me as a moron.

To wipe the slate clean, I fired a round into the ceiling.

It worked—the same woman as before screamed, louder and more shrilly. 

Regrettably, the gunshot startled my father-in-law, a man with a congenital heart defect, into cardiac arrest. 

I peered over the counter and saw him on the floor, tongue hanging from his mouth. 

I didn’t want him to die, but more importantly, I didn’t want his sudden death to cause my mother-in-law to spiral, which would, in turn, cause my wife to lose her mind.

At the same time, I couldn’t stomach the idea of a failed bank robbery forever cementing my reputation in my wife and her family’s eyes, however warranted, of being bad with money. 

And so, I turned the gun on the next teller over. 

As I drove home, I felt a surreal sense of pride in my accomplishment.

Prior to his retirement, my father-in-law had been a pillar of the community, had received the key to the city twice over, but I was certain that he had never earned $32,000 in a single day.

It dawned on me that for that very reason I couldn’t just present $32,000 cash to my wife without inviting suspicion. She would probably connect it to the potentially fatal bank robbery at my father-in-law’s part-time job.

I swerved left and pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall with a Cash 4 Gold storefront. I figured I could come up with a way to explain $32,000 worth of gold bars that wouldn’t immediately connect back to the robbery.

Unfortunately, as I found out from the gray-stubbled Cash 4 Gold employee, the titular transaction was generally handled in the opposite order of what I needed—you brought gold, they gave you cash. 

Technically, he said, we could sell you $32,000 worth of gold, but it would be in the form of gold jewelry that folks previously sold to us. Also, I haven’t been trained on that yet, so you’d have to wait for Tim to come in on Wednesday morning.

As I mulled over what this meant for me re: cash, gold, and my wife, a desperate-looking man who may or may not have been the son-in-law of the retirement-age Cash 4 Gold employee burst into the store shouting, This is a robbery. 

I panicked, handed him the bag of money and dropped to my knees, begging for my life as he ran out of the store.

It was only after he left that I realized that at no point did I actually see him holding a gun, just his hand in his jacket. Then I remembered that the security guard’s gun had been tucked into my waistband the entire time.

I considered using it to rob the Cash 4 Gold, but decided that would present the same problem as before—even if I came home with a different $32,000 than was taken from her father’s branch, good luck proving that to my wife. I decided to quit while I was ahead and go home. 

When I walked through the back door, my wife asked me if I had remembered to drop off my father-in-law’s wristwatch at the bank. 

I felt my back pocket and confirmed to myself and then to her that no, I had not.

She laughed and started to say something to the effect of, If your head wasn’t connected to your neck you’d leave it behind, when at that exact moment the gun tucked into my waistband shot my penis clean off.


JOSH BARNETT is a writer living in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, a five-minute walk from Lake Michigan. He's originally from Cleveland, a four-and-a-half day walk from Lake Michigan in really good shoes. Find more of his stuff at joshbar.net.


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