Dani arrived at seven with the list in her head and the coffee already on, because some doctrines are best expressed through appliances. Lucia arrived at seven-fifteen with pastries from the bakery on the corner, purchased with her own money and submitted, with a flourish, as an expense the bank would either honor or be shamed by forever, a piece of administrative brinkmanship Dolly admired aloud. Dolly arrived at seven-thirty in a cardigan buttoned correctly in every particular, carrying both notebooks, the blue one for the record and the old one for the company, and took up her station at the service desk with the air of a lighthouse keeper on a morning when ships were expected and welcomed in equal measure. The committee — a lending officer, a school counselor liaison, Ostrander, who had asked, quietly and without explanation to anyone but himself, to be assigned to this and nothing else that day — arranged themselves in the glass offices with the doors open and the chairs at angles that suggested conversation rather than judgment, an arrangement Dani had specified in a memo that Ostrander had read twice and approved without changing a comma, which she chose to take as his apology, complete and in writing, for having once stood silent in a doorway conversation, and he chose to let her.
The applicants came in the way water finds a building, one at a time and then, around nine, in a small weather of their own. The young woman from the welding program arrived with her folder and her handshake fully assembled, and Dani did not let the polish rush her; she asked the name she already knew, and the errand she already knew, and seated her with coffee she accepted and a banker she would remember, and the girl's shoulders, under the polish, came down the same inch the contractor's had in April, and Dani understood that confidence, too, is often only a costume the young wear into buildings that frighten them, and the door's work is the same underneath every costume. The electrical boy arrived with his mother, who intended, visibly, to wait in the car, and who was instead asked her name as well, and seated, and given coffee in a real cup, because Dani had written into the standard's local practice, in her own hand, in the margin where the truth of standards mostly lives, that a person who brings an applicant to a door is a guest of the door too, and the mother held the cup in both hands for the whole interview like an anchor. The returning student of thirty-one arrived between shifts, in scrubs under a coat, with eleven minutes to spare and an apology ready for being exactly on time, and was relieved of the apology at the door as if it were a wet umbrella, something a guest should never have to carry through a welcome.
Floyd arrived at eight-forty, unannounced to anyone but Dolly, who had marked the third chair in the blue notebook that morning with a notation in her clear hand: reserved, founder, early. He was not on the committee. He had asked, through Alison's office, whether his presence would be a help or a weight, and had accepted Alison's answer — a help, if he sat in the lobby and was only a man in it — with the understanding of a person who has spent a year learning the difference between being the lesson and being its audience. He wore a good jacket this time, though not a suit, and boots that were clean, though they were the same boots, and he carried nothing but a cap he did not need, the rain being, for once, only theoretical at his arrival. He nodded to Dani across the lobby. He nodded to Dolly, who nodded back with the serenity of a reference work confirming a citation. He lowered himself into the third chair, with the operation, and the treaty, and prepared, visibly, to wait out the morning.
Lois Hartnett arrived at nine-fifteen with no errand whatsoever and was seated, by right of conquest, in the second chair. She had heard about the interviews from a teller at the grocery store, in the manner of all true news in a city, and she had come, she explained to Lucia, to audit the proceedings, as a fifty-year customer and a party to the original events, and she intended to require no services, accept one coffee, and miss nothing. "I timed it by my statement last time," she told Floyd, settling her handbag like a border stone. "Twenty-five minutes, that day in the rain. I've waited all winter to see what the building does with a morning when it's expecting to be judged by its guests instead of its numbers. Hush now. Here comes another one."