Dani read him in four seconds. Shoes: work boots, wet, leaving the faintest prints on the tile she had watched the cleaner mop an hour ago. Hands: broad, scarred at the knuckles, empty. No folder. No envelope. No calm, she thought, though what she was actually seeing was a man in no hurry, which her training had not given her a category for.
She stepped forward with her tablet and her practiced brightness.
"Afternoon," she said. "Are you picking something up, or did you need the machine?"
Floyd looked at her, mildly, the way he looked at a new hire holding a tape measure backward, without malice and without rescue. "I have an appointment," he said. "Two o'clock. I'm early."
"With a banker?" The brightness held, but a small gear in it slipped. Appointments belonged to the other kind of visitor. She glanced down at the tablet, where the afternoon's schedule unspooled in blue blocks, names she recognized and names she had been told to anticipate. She did not see one that belonged to a man in a canvas jacket. The two o'clock was there, but it was marked with initials and a company name, and companies, in her four seconds of training, arrived as suits with leather cases. "Can I get the name on the appointment?"
"Briggs," he said.
She scrolled. She frowned, not at him, at the screen, and the frown undid her. Because the entry said Briggs Building Supply, facility review, and under it, in the notes field, a line someone in lending had typed weeks ago and she had never been meant to read closely: principal attending in person. The word principal did not fit the boots. The boots did not fit the word. Dani did what her training told her to do with a thing that did not fit. She moved it somewhere else.
"That meeting's for the company's representative," she said, and heard, even as she said it, how neat and terrible it sounded. "If you're dropping something off for them, I can take it at the desk. Or if it's your own banking, the kiosk handles most things, deposits, transfers, that kind of thing. There's also the North Side branch, they have more tellers on this afternoon, if you need a person. This location runs banker appointments mostly, by, um. By relationship."
She did not say he did not belong. She would tell her mother later, with precision, that she never said any such thing, and it would be true, and it would not help. What she said was worse in the way that polished things are worse than blunt ones. She offered him everywhere in the world except the chair he was standing in front of.
Floyd considered her. He was not a tall man, but he had the stillness of people who lift heavy things for a living, an economy of movement that read, to the young and the hurried, as slowness.
"I'll wait," he said.
"The lobby's really for scheduled clients," she said, gently, as if volume could soften the shape of it. "I can book you in with a banker Thursday. Or the kiosk, honestly, it's faster than you'd think. Most people prefer it once they try."
From the low gray chairs, an old woman with a handbag held square on her knees looked up over her glasses. Lois Hartnett had been waiting twenty minutes to ask about a charge on her statement that she did not understand and suspected she would be embarrassed by, and she had watched the door the whole time because there was nothing else to watch. She had seen two men in suits walked back like honored weather. She had seen a mother with a baby and a rent check pointed, smiling, at the screen. She saw the man in the canvas jacket take in the young woman's words without flinching, and something about the set of his shoulders, scarred hands folded over a wet cap, tugged at a memory she could not yet name, a photograph in a newspaper, a ribbon being cut somewhere with oversized scissors.
Floyd nodded once, as if Dani had answered a question he had actually asked. "Thursday," he repeated. "All right." He moved past her, not toward the kiosk and not toward the door, and lowered himself into the third chair in the row, next to Lois Hartnett, with the small grunt men his age make a treaty with and never discuss. He set his cap on his knee. He folded his hands. He prepared, visibly, to wait out the weather, the afternoon, and possibly the century.