The Cheque That Grows If You Wait

The peppers were the small waxy ones that only turned up at the market for three weeks in July, and Simon was carrying them because he'd reached the bag first.

Joanne walked beside him with her hands free and her tote over one shoulder. Inside it was the good notebook, and folded into that were the four pages from Service Canada.

Four days since she'd opened them at her own table with her brother sitting across from her. Four days, and she had thought about almost nothing else.

She had the number, at least. It cost $34,080 to maintain her lifestyle for twelve months. She had added it twice and got the same answer both times. What she did not have was the first idea what to do about that last page: when she should start CPP.

"Three doors," she said. They were passing the honey stall. "That's what I've been calling them in my head. This year. Sixty-five. Seventy."

"Three doors is about right."

"And the longer I wait, the more they give me. Which I don't understand, frankly. It's my money. Thirty years putting money into CPP. Why should they pay me more for starting it later?"

"Do you want the answer," Simon said, "or would you rather be annoyed about it a while longer?"

"Annoyed first. Then the answer."

He laughed. They walked. A man selling enormous rhubarb had a sign propped against a coffee can, Honour box, and Joanne thought, as she always did passing that table, that she liked a town where that still worked.

They found the coffee cart at the corner, the one that only ever took cash, and she bought two. They sat at a picnic table that wobbled on one leg. She took out the notebook and opened it flat to a clean page.

Simon took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on.

"Write them out," he said. "All three."

So she did, saying them as she went.

If I start this year, $507 a month. At sixty-five, $712. At seventy, $1,011.

Seeing them stacked like that did something the government's page had not. On Sunday they had been a line on a form. In her notebook, a few pages past where she wrote down everything she spent in a year, she wrote the numbers, the three doors to choose from.

"Now," Simon said. "Say what you see."

"The one at seventy is twice the one at sixty-one." She checked it. "Very nearly twice."

"Nine years of waiting, and the cheque doubles." He turned his cup around on the table. "It's arithmetic. Start now and they'll be paying you for a lot longer, so each payment has to be smaller. Wait, and there are fewer years left to pay you, so each one gets bigger."

"So it comes out the same either way."

"It would, if everybody lived exactly as long as everybody else. That's what they build it all on. An average."

"So it comes down to how long I last."

"That's it."

Joanne looked at the middle number for a while.

She was sixty-one, and had been on her own a long time. She was lucky enough to have been able to work regularly. Somewhere in all that, without ever deciding to, she had become a person who would always take more secure employment for less, rather than not knowing before the semester started whether she would be working.

"My instinct is to grab it," she said. "The one at sixty-one. Something in me doesn't trust an offer that improves the longer I leave it alone. That sounds like a trick."

"I know how it sounds. There's a fair question underneath it, though." Simon drank some of his coffee. "It's asking how long you'll live. If you knew you had ten years, you'd take it at sixty-one and never look back. More payments, and who cares that they're small."

"I don't know how long I'll live for." She said it flatly. It was the same rude guess that had kept her up a few weeks ago.

"No. But you know a few things." He set the cup down. "You're out at Mom's every second Saturday. She's eighty-seven and still does her own stairs. Grandma Calder made it past ninety-two. You've never smoked, you walk everywhere, and you've got a bag of vegetables to prove it. The women in our family outlast everybody, Jo. They always have."

"That is a cheerful way to put it."

"I'm being serious." He tapped the bottom line, the seventy. "Run it out to ninety. $507 a month from sixty-one comes to less money than $1,011 a month from seventy, even starting nine years later. And the big one is still turning up when you're eighty-five and the people who took theirs early have spent everything they had."

She sat thinking about that. The table wobbled when she leaned on it. She could hear someone's dog barking over by the rhubarb stand.

Then she looked back through her notebook and ran her finger down to the list.

"The house is $7,824 a year," she said. "Taxes, insurance, anything that comes through a pipe."

She did the multiplication in the margin, because she could not help herself. $712 a month, twelve months. $8,544. For one bright second it covered her house and left change.

Then she made herself turn the page.

There it was in the second set of numbers, in her own careful hand. The house again. $2,850 in repairs. The basement window. The furnace. She had written that line herself, and she had wanted, just then, not to have.

$7,824 and $2,850. $10,674. She put it under the other two.

"It doesn't do it," she said. "Not at sixty-five."

"No," Simon said. "It doesn't."

"But at seventy." She was already multiplying. $1,011, twelve months. $12,132. "At seventy it pays the whole thing. All of it. Including if things need to be repaired."

She felt a sense of relief, a weight lifted off her shoulders.

"For good," she said. "And it goes up with the cost of living."

"Every year," Simon said. "Your RRSP can't promise you that. It rides up and down with the market and you always need to keep an eye on it. This one gets bigger for every month you leave it, then climbs with the price of bread for as long as you're here. Guaranteed. You don't have to do one thing."

Joanne wrote house beside the $12,132, and underlined it.

"That's before tax, mind you," Simon said. "All of it is. Some of it goes back at filing time, and there's a whole conversation coming about which account you draw the rest from. But not today."

"Not today." She left the underline where it was. "And if I take it now instead, and put every dollar straight in the bank?"

"Then you're ahead for a while, and waiting catches you up somewhere around seventy-nine. Live past that and you'd have done better to wait." He shrugged. "That's the whole bet. That's the only thing you're actually deciding."

There was a wrinkle she'd known about since Sunday, because she had read those first three pages more carefully than she'd let on. Sessional work wasn't always consistent. There were terms she'd taught two courses, terms she'd taught none, and the empty ones were pulling the average down.

"It's lower than it should be," she said. "All those low years count against me. Somebody with a proper pension job would be looking at a much better page."

"Some of them do." Simon didn't soften the rest of it. "You earned what you earned, and nobody's handing you the maximum. Waiting does the same thing to your number that it'd do to theirs. The proportion doesn't care how big the cheque is." He nodded at her handwriting. "Yours still doubles."

She closed the notebook on her pen and slid it back into her tote. She said she'd think about it, and Simon knew what that meant from her. She had already started counting, and would not stop until she worked out the numbers.

"You're not going to tell me which door," she said.

"No." He stood and handed her the peppers. "It's your cheque. You've got the idea of it now."

They walked back through the thinning crowd, past the man boxing up the last of the honey, and just short of her car they ran into Marilyn Hsu.

Marilyn was two weeks retired and looked ten years younger, a flat of bedding plants under one arm. She had stayed on past sixty-five, which Joanne had always assumed was because she loved the work. She talked for a while about her scarlet runners and a raccoon situation before the conversation turned, the way conversations with the newly retired do, to money.

"Oh, and watch out," Marilyn said, shifting the flat. "They took part of mine back. My Old Age Security. A letter came, called it a recovery tax. Said I'd made too much the year before, if you can believe it." She laughed. "Reduced every month since. Nobody tells you that part."

Joanne said something light about nothing ever being simple, and Marilyn went off to find her own car. Simon smiled and said he'd see her Sunday, and went to find his car.

Marilyn's comment stayed with her the whole way home. She had spent the morning learning that one government cheque grew if you were patient with it. And here was a woman she'd taught beside for years, telling her that a different one could be handed over and then partly taken back.

She got into the house and put the peppers on the counter. Tomorrow she would sit down and work out all three doors properly.

The other cheque was four years off. She had never given it a thought, and now she knew they could take part of it back. She went up to bed still turning that over.