"I am," Floyd said. "I've been invited to sit in. By the service desk, in a chair with my name on the program, as founder, which is a word that means the person who has to behave." He looked out his kitchen window at the rain deciding whether to be snow. "I'm going early," he said. "It's the only part of the proceedings I trust myself to perform exactly right."
Alison Greer had a meeting in April that she had been dreading since October, which is to say she had been dreading it accurately and for the right length of time.
The Premier Branch designations were announced at the regional leadership summit, in a hotel ballroom in Seattle with a view of water that had not been consulted about the proceedings. Riverside was not on the list. Riverside had never, officially, been withdrawn in public; the withdrawal lived in a file, where Alison had put it, with its explanatory note, in the belief that the file was where such things belonged. But a ballroom full of bankers is a sensory organ evolved over centuries to detect exactly one thing, the absence of an expected name, and by the coffee break three people had asked her, in the corridor tones of the profession, how Riverside was doing, really, and she had answered all three the same way, because she had decided in October that she was done producing beautiful surfaces over unexamined floors.
"Riverside is doing the slowest, most expensive, most necessary work in my region," she said. "Its numbers this year will be worse than last year's, on paper. Last year's were produced by sending three hundred and twelve clients a letter suggesting they leave, coding forty-seven complaints as requests for directions, and training a twenty-four-year-old to judge a client's worth by his shoes in four seconds. This year's numbers include the cost of not doing that. I will defend this year's numbers in any room in this bank, including this one, and I have the notebook to do it with." She did not, in fact, have the notebook, which was in Dolly Ferreira's drawer in Spokane, closed, but the sentence had the virtue of being true in spirit, and the corridor, which respected documentation the way sailors respect weather, let her pass.
What she did have, and what she carried into that summit season like a stone she had chosen, was the memory of a signature — her own, on the modernization memo, in this same building's paper incarnation, authorizing branches to help administer the ombuds queue. For reasons of efficiency. She had not designed Colby's system. She had built, without knowing it, the unlit corridor his system walked down. All winter, while the region's notices went out over her name and the apologies went out under her cramping hand, she had been composing, in the back of her mind, the part of the report that was hers, and in March she had put it where it belonged: not in a file, but in the record of the audit committee itself, in her own voice, in a session whose minutes would outlive every person in the room. The region had trusted a queue it should have guarded. The efficiency had been hers. The remedy — raw feed preserved, reporting line moved to the committee's own office, branch hands off the coding of their own complaints, permanently, in every region, a change the other regions adopted by midsummer with the speed of institutions that have seen a neighboring house catch fire — was also, now, hers, and she intended the two facts to travel together for the rest of her career, like a debt and its payment, recorded in the same ledger.
Her deputy asked her, driving to the airport, whether she thought it had been worth it, meaning the quarter, the designation, the corridor, the stone. Alison watched the water go by, unconsulted. "A credit officer I trained with," she said, "used to say that every bank has two balance sheets. The one it publishes, and the one made of what people tell their families at dinner about what happened at the bank that day. The second one decides whether the first one survives a bad year. We were rich on the first and spending the second like water, and the terrible part is that the spending was invisible to us, because the people doing the telling had been coded as directional inquiries." She shook her head. "Floyd Briggs sat in a lobby for twenty-five minutes and read the second balance sheet. He didn't even need the whole quarter. That's what I keep coming back to. Twenty-five minutes. The information was never hidden. It was just standing at a door we weren't watching, being polite, in boots."