He had built the business out of that account. First the truck, then the tools the truck made possible, then a leased yard with a fence he built himself on weekends, then the second yard, then Carol beside him in an office with a space heater, doing the books in pencil and making him eat lunch. The bank had grown with him, or he had grown with the bank, the two statements amounting to the same history told from opposite chairs. Loans had been signed in rooms in this building by men who knew his father's name and his crews' names. His daughter had worked a summer at the teller line in college. The Carol Briggs Trades Scholarship, twelve thousand dollars a year to two kids from the trades programs who wanted tools, tuition, a start, was administered out of this branch, because Carol had said, when they set it up the year before she got sick, that money for beginners ought to be handed over by people who would learn the beginners' names.
Those beginners, Floyd thought, looking at the door, would arrive exactly like the roofer. Like the girl with the plastic sleeve. Like himself in 1984, in boots, with no folder, no calm, and a check he was afraid of.
Lois Hartnett, in the second chair, had finished watching him watch, and had arrived, by the slow arithmetic of the elderly, at the photograph. It had run in the paper two winters back, a piece about local employers keeping crews on through a hard season. A man in a canvas jacket, standing in front of stacked lumber with his arms folded, squinting into the sun. She remembered it now because she had cut it out, she who cut nothing out, and put it on her refrigerator, where it still was, because the man had said something in the article about not laying people off in January that she had wanted to remember when her grandson complained about his boss.
"They cut your picture out of the paper for my fridge," she said, without preamble, "and this child thinks you're here to use the cash machine."
Floyd turned. "Ma'am?"
"I know your face," Lois said. "I can't have your name, it goes when I reach for it, that's eighty years doing what it does, but I know it. You build things. Lumber." She peered at him. "You look smaller in a chair."
"Most men do," Floyd said, and surprised himself by smiling. "It's the chairs they buy for these places. Designed by a committee that hates men."
"Hm." She settled her handbag. "I've banked here fifty years. My husband opened our account when this was a different bank with a different name and better chairs." She looked toward Dani, who was at that moment guiding a delivery driver, with great gentleness, to the kiosk. "They're trained for it, you know. It's not the girl. My granddaughter works over at the credit union and says they all get the same lessons now, somewhere, about flows. We're a flow." She said the word as if it had a taste. "I come in person because I don't trust the telephone voices. And every month it's a new young person explaining that I don't need a person."
"Why do you stay?" Floyd asked, because he was, he realized, asking himself.
"Because my money's tired," Lois said promptly. "It's been here fifty years. Moving it sounds exhausting." She looked at him sideways. "Also Dolly. Dolly Ferreira still works here, back by the service desk where they keep the people who know things, like reference books. She'd never point you at a machine. She once chased a man two blocks in the snow with his hat." She nodded toward the service desk, which stood empty, with a small sign and a bell. "She's on her break. She takes it at the same time every day, out back with the smokers, though she never smoked a day in her life. She says the smokers are the only staff who still talk about their families."
As if the building had been listening for its cue, the side door opened.