Dani stood a moment with her tablet against her chest. A feeling had arrived that her training had no name for either. It was not guilt, not yet. It was the sense of a step missed on a staircase she had been assured was solid. She pushed it down where she pushed all the day's small discomforts, beside the ache in her feet, and turned to greet the next arrival, a woman in a navy coat with a folder, whom she welcomed by name from the schedule and walked personally to a banker's open door.
For twenty minutes, Floyd Briggs sat in the third chair and watched his bank receive the public.
He was good at watching. Carpentry teaches it before it teaches anything else. You watch how a board wants to split before you put a nail near it. You watch a new man's feet on a ladder. Running a yard had refined the skill into something closer to accounting. From a chair, a business will show you its real books if you count the right things. So he counted.
A young man came in with a paycheck folded in his back pocket and sawdust in his hair, a roofer by the look of the tar under his nails, and asked, in the lowered voice people use for money troubles, whether somebody could help him open an account that his checks could go into directly, so the check-cashing place on Division would stop taking its bite. Dani was kind to him. Floyd wanted that noted, and noted it. She was kind in the manner of a signpost. She showed him the kiosk, she showed him the brochure rack, she explained that account openings were handled online now, mostly, it was simple, and when the young man said he did not have a phone that did that, she said the library had computers, still smiling, as if she had solved the weather. The roofer stood at the kiosk for a while, poking at the screen with one tarred finger, and then he left with his paycheck still folded in his pocket, and the door sighed shut behind him, and nobody wrote anything down.
A woman came in carrying a toddler and a letter she held away from her body like something that might stain. She had a question about the letter. It used the word relationship three times, she said, and she could not tell if her account was being closed. Dani read it standing up, quickly, the way you read a parking ticket for a stranger. "It's informational," she said. "It just means your account works better in a different structure. The letter explains the options." The woman asked if a banker could explain the options, since the letter had not. Dani glanced at the glass offices, where two bankers sat in the posture of men guarding empty chairs, and said the bankers were with scheduled clients until four, but the number on the letter reached a team that could help. The woman thanked her with the terrible courtesy of people who know they are being handed off, and carried her letter and her child out into the rain.
A man in a suit with a leather case got coffee, a handshake, and a banker before the door had finished closing behind him. A retired couple who asked about renewing a certificate were seated, offered water, and given a printed rate sheet and a personal assurance that their banker would call by Friday. An older man in a veteran's cap who needed a notary was directed, with genuine regret, across town. A girl of maybe nineteen, holding a scholarship application in a plastic sleeve to keep it dry, asked where the interviews were held, and Dani, before she could stop herself, said, "Those are in spring," and then, catching the girl's face, softened it with, "You can submit it online, though, the portal's really clear," and the girl nodded and went out holding the sleeve against her chest like a shield.
Floyd sat with his hands folded and felt something settle in him that was not anger, though anger was in the neighborhood. It was nearer to grief. He knew this building. He knew the older building under this building, the one with the wood counter, where in 1984 a clerk named Dolores Ferreira had opened an account for a twenty-five-year-old carpenter who had just been paid in full, in cash and a check, for his first solo job, a deck and a set of stairs for a family on the South Hill. He had been so afraid the check would prove no good that he had carried it in his shirt pocket against his heart all morning like a warrant. Dolly, who had been maybe twenty-seven and already had the air of a woman who had seen every variety of human embarrassment and filed it kindly, had counted his cash twice, had explained the hold on the check without making him feel small about needing it explained, and had written his account number on a card in handwriting so clear he kept that card in his wallet for eleven years after he no longer needed it.