The lobby of Heartland Bancshares had been built in 1924 by people who believed a bank should look like a promise. It had a ceiling the color of old cream, tall windows that took the morning in slabs, and a floor of marble squares worn, in the traffic lanes between the doors and the desks, to the shallow gloss of a river stone. There were four pillars. The second pillar from the door was the one the light reached first, and the chair beside it — a heavy wooden chair with a leather seat, one of a row left over from the days when customers waited to be called to a desk like parishioners — was where Vera Stadler sat on Mondays.
She arrived at five minutes past nine, as she had arrived at five minutes past nine on every Monday since March, when the bank announced that the building would come down. The announcement had been made with renderings: a glass tower, a plaza, a water feature, the words *centennial* and *next century* in large, friendly letters. The old lobby was to be photographed, documented, and demolished, in that order, and the tower would rise on the site with a plaque somewhere in its basement recording that banking had occurred here before.
Vera was eighty-one years old. She wore a plain navy dress, a coat that had been good in another decade and was still warm, and shoes chosen for the bus and the walk from the bus. She carried a handbag, a folded newspaper, and nothing else that anyone could see. She crossed the lobby at the pace of a woman who has decided that her body will take the time it takes, and she sat down in the chair by the second pillar, and she folded her hands over the handbag in her lap, and she looked at the room the way a person looks at a room she has no intention of leaving soon.
At the teller line, Nadia Kowalski saw her come in and felt the small, complicated lift she had felt every Monday for five months. Nadia was twenty-four, the youngest teller on the floor, hired out of a community college accounting program and still at the stage where she said *ma'am* to anyone over fifty and meant it as respect rather than habit. On the first Monday, in March, she had watched the old woman sit down and had thought, with the clarity of the new, that somebody ought to bring her a cup of tea, because the woman was plainly going to be there a while and the lobby was cold near the windows. So she had done it, in a bank mug, with the bag still in, and Vera Stadler had looked up and thanked her with a formality that made Nadia feel, absurdly, like the hostess of something.
"You are the only one who has offered," Vera had said. "Don't let them train it out of you."
Since then the tea was a ritual neither of them acknowledged as one. Nadia brought it when the line allowed. Vera drank it slowly. And at some point in the first half hour of every Monday, Vera would rise, cross to the reception desk, and make her request, in the same words, in the same tone, as if she were asking the time.
"I would like ten minutes with the chairman, please. Whenever it suits him. I will be in the chair by the second pillar."
The desk staff had a procedure by then, though it was written nowhere. The request was received with grave courtesy. A note was made on a slip. The slip went into a tray. The tray, Nadia understood without ever being told, was emptied into nothing at the end of the day. Vera understood it too. She made the request anyway, the way you knock on a door you know is locked in a house you partly own — because the knocking is the point, and because somebody inside might one day be ashamed of the lock.
Monday was not a random choice. Monday had been Emil's audit day. For thirty-one years, Emil Stadler, chief internal auditor of Heartland Mutual Savings, had come into this building on Monday mornings with a briefcase that weighed what other men's consciences weighed, and had begun the week's audit work before the branches had finished counting the weekend. Vera had packed his lunch on Mondays. She had ironed his shirt on Sunday nights for Mondays. When the bank decided, this spring, to take the building down, she had considered what a widow does with a notice like that, and she had concluded that she would sit in the lobby on her husband's audit day until the chairman of the bank gave her ten minutes, or until the wreckers did.