So he did not sign that day. He did a thing instead that Alison Greer would later describe to her deputy as the most instructive piece of negotiation of her career, because it contained no negotiation at all. He telephoned the branch, asked for the service desk, and invited Dolly Ferreira to lunch.
They ate at the diner on Riverside that had survived the remodel of everything around it by the strategy of never once changing. Dolly ordered soup with the confidence of a woman who has read a menu as a historical document. Floyd, out of a suit for the first time in the story the bank was telling itself about him, wore the canvas jacket, because it was his jacket and the weather was the weather, and he watched the diner's door the way he now suspected he would watch every door for the rest of his life, and was content with the sentence.
"You kept a notebook," he said. "Forty-one years in that place, Dolly, and the truest paper in it was in your handbag. How are you, actually? Not the bank's version."
"I'm a witness with a pension," Dolly said, "which at my age is a promotion." She blew on her soup. "They've offered me a title, Floyd. Mentor. It comes with a lanyard. I told them I'd mentor anybody who'll sit still, but I won't wear a lanyard, I've buried two husbands and a merger and I draw the line at lanyards." Her eyes were bright and entirely unsentimental. "They're frightened uptown, in the useful way. Ms. Greer is the real thing, I think. She read my notebook like it was a bank document. Nobody's ever read anything of mine like it was a bank document. I came home and told my sister, I said, my handwriting's been to headquarters."
"And the girl?" Floyd asked.
"Dani." Dolly pronounced the name the way you set a tool back in its place. "Dani is making calls. It was her idea, the whole list, all three hundred and twelve, her voice, no script at the start until she wrote one she could stand to say. Some of them hang up on her. A man in Hillyard called her a word I'd have slapped off a teller in 1987. She calls back the next day, that one, same time, and says, Mr. So-and-so, I was the voice at the door of your bank, and I am not calling to keep your account, I'm calling because the letter you got had my building's name on it and I handed those letters to people with my own hands. He stayed on the line twenty minutes the second day. He's keeping his account, which is not the point, she says, and she's right, and I tell her so, and she writes that down too. She's got a notebook now." Dolly's smile arrived slowly, like weather clearing. "Drugstore issue. I checked."
Floyd sat with that a while, the soup, the rain, the reference section at lunch. "Then I'll sign," he said at last. "And I'll add a page."
The signing, when it happened the following week, had no photographer, at Floyd's request, and no oversized scissors anywhere on the premises. It happened in the glass office at Riverside, with Ostrander's honest numbers and Alison Greer down from headquarters in person, and Dolly Ferreira in attendance by name in the minutes, at the service of the record. Fourteen million dollars moved across a table in the unglamorous form of signatures, initials, dates, the machinery by which a yard gets built and ninety people keep working through a downturn. Floyd signed the facility entire, and then produced, from the folder he had carried in — a folder, Dani would note later, he had brought a folder — one additional page, typed by his office manager on his instructions and read aloud before he signed it, so that no one could later call it fine print.
The page said that the Carol Briggs Trades Scholarship, administered by the bank since its founding, would hold its interviews each spring at the Riverside branch, at real desks, with the applicants' names learned in advance by the staff who received them; that the applicants would be offered coffee, or water, or nothing, as they preferred, but would in all cases be asked what they had come for before they were directed anywhere; and that the scholarship's interviews would be opened each year by the reading of no speech and the making of no photograph, the page specified, because the applicants were not the bank's advertisement but its guests. Alison read the page twice, in silence, and then signed the bank's acceptance of it herself, below his signature, with the pen she had used for three hundred and twelve apologies.