Dani went. She walked through the branch with her tablet forgotten at the curved desk, past the bankers who were now standing, sensing weather, past the coffee machine with its apologetic sign, and knocked on the glass door of the manager's office with a knuckle that sounded, even to her, like an alarm.
Colby Strand was forty-one and dressed, each day, as the man he intended to be at fifty. His office had a plant he watered himself and a framed print of a sailboat and, turned discreetly toward the wall-side of his desk, a laminated card with the branch's quarterly rankings in a font too small for visitors. The branch stood second in the region. The card was a reminder that second was a kind of losing he could fix. He had a meeting at three with the regional office by video, at which the Premier Branch designations would be previewed, and he had spent the morning in the pleasant state of a man rehearsing modesty.
He came out of the office at a pace just below a run, arranging his face as he came, and what arrived in the lobby was a welcome two sizes too large for the man it was aimed at. His hand came out a yard early. His smile deployed. "Mr. Briggs," he said, with the warmth of a fireplace in a showroom. "What an honor, what a pleasure. We've been expecting you, the team is ready, I had no idea you'd arrived, why didn't anyone — " His gaze passed over Dani like weather over a fence. "We have the office prepared, coffee, water, whatever you'd like, and I believe lending has the full packet, we can get started right away, we're all just delighted — "
Floyd shook the offered hand, because his mother had raised him to shake a hand that was offered, and looked at him with an expression that Colby, who was good at faces in the way a weatherman is good at sky, could not immediately read.
"Colby Strand," Floyd said. "We've met at the chamber dinner."
"Twice," Colby said, brightening. "And at the ground-breaking on Nevada. I had my office pull everything, the expansion numbers are genuinely exciting, the north side demographics alone — " He gestured toward the glass office, an usher at a theater, a man opening a door to a warmer room. "Shall we?"
"In a minute," Floyd said. He had not moved. "I want you to meet my banker first." He turned, with the deliberation of long habit, and nodded toward Dolly Ferreira, who stood by the service desk with her cardigan buttoned wrong and her chin at an angle that several generations of branch managers would have recognized, too late, as artillery. "Dolly's been my banker forty-one years. I expect she'll sit in."
The silence that followed had furniture in it. Colby's smile held, because it was professionally attached, but something behind it was doing arithmetic. "Of course," he said at last. "Of course. Dolly, would you — yes. Please. Both of you. This way."
"Third chair," Lois Hartnett said to the room at large, as the three of them crossed the lobby, Floyd walking between the manager and the reference section like a man escorted by his past and his future, neither of which had sent him to the kiosk. "He waited in the third chair. Remember that when they tell it."
The glass office had been prepared with the care of a stage set. A folder of bonded paper sat at each place. A carafe sweated politely. On the wall screen, paused, was a rendering of the new yard as it might look in a world without rain, all clean lines and young trees, with the Briggs sign in the company's green. A lending officer named Ostrander joined them, a decent man of fifty with a tie he had loosened in the corridor and tightened again at the door, and he laid out, in the first minutes, the shape of the facility with professional pride. Fourteen million. A term the bank could hold comfortably. A rate that reflected, he said, beaming slightly in Floyd's direction, the depth of the relationship.
Relationship. Floyd sat in the better chair, Dolly at his left with a notepad she had brought out of pure reflex, and listened to the word come around again and again, like a dog returning to a porch. The relationship was forty years deep. The relationship was among the bank's most valued. The relationship, Colby said, in his fireplace voice, was exactly the kind the Riverside branch had been rebuilt to serve.
"That's fine work," Floyd said, when Ostrander had finished, and the lending officer nodded, pleased, and reached for the summary page. "The numbers are honest and the rate's fair. I've read the term sheet twice. My people have read it three times. I came today expecting to tell you yes and work out the calendar."