He had meant to. That was the unbearable part; he had genuinely meant to. There had been the estate, and the bank's transition, and his father's decline that winter — the illness so quick that by the time the family understood it, the questions that could be asked had narrowed to the medical ones. Harlan Ames died three days after Christmas with the ledger unasked about, and Fred had stood at a second grave in the same cemetery and had understood that he had been given a sentence at a funeral and had let it expire, and he had carried it for sixteen years the way you carry a stone in a coat you rarely wear: not constantly felt, never actually absent.
"Mrs. Stadler," he said, in his own lobby, and his voice was not the chairman's voice, and everyone near enough to hear it knew the difference. The color had gone out of his face. Nadia Kowalski, watching, would tell her sister that night that she had finally learned what people meant by that expression — that it was not theatrical, that it was the blood simply leaving, on orders from somewhere older than the man.
"Mr. Ames," Vera said. "You have your father's walk. I heard it before I saw you." She folded the newspaper once, exactly. "You got my page."
"I got your page." He glanced at the chair beside hers — the row of heavy chairs, the whole memorial fleet of them. "May I sit down?"
"It is your bank," she said, "and they are your chairs. But I am obliged to you for asking." She moved her handbag from the chair to her lap, and the chairman of Heartland Bancshares sat down beside the widow of its chief internal auditor, in the lobby his family had built and his board intended to demolish, and the two of them sat in the posture of people waiting to be called to a desk, while the bank conducted its business around them at a slightly lowered volume, the way a household lowers its voice around a grief.
"You told me once to ask my father a question," Fred said at last. "At his funeral. I never asked it. He died that winter, and I have thought about that sentence of yours, Mrs. Stadler, more often than I have admitted to anyone. I am not going to make the same mistake in the same room."
"No," Vera said. "You are not. That is why I keep coming on Mondays." She turned her head and looked at him fully, and her eyes were dry and entirely composed. "I am too old to outwait another generation of this family, Mr. Ames, and you are too young to want to be outwaited. So. Ask me now, sixteen years late, what you were supposed to ask your father. Ask me about the members' ledger. And when you have heard it, you may have your ten minutes' worth of me — for I find that I am the one who asked for ten minutes, all these months, and you are the one who needs considerably longer."
Fred Ames sat in the chair by the second pillar and did the thing his father had died unasked. "Mrs. Stadler," he said, "what is the members' ledger?"
"Come upstairs," said Vera Stadler, rising, with the handbag over her forearm and the newspaper under her arm, "and I will tell you what your bank owes and to whom. Bring the page. You will want to be looking at the stamp when I explain whose office filed it, and whose office took it out again."
His office was quieter than the lobby and colder, in the way of rooms whose windows do not open. Vera declined the chair he offered her at first, and stood instead at the window, looking down Locust Street, while he arranged — with a host's helplessness that would have shamed him in any other meeting — water, coffee, the page, squared on the desk between them like a fourth person at the table.
"You have to understand what the bank was," she said at last, "before you can understand what was taken. Your great-grandfather's generation founded Heartland as a mutual. Do you know what that means, in law and not in brochure? It means the depositors owned it. Not the way a town owns a park. The way shareholders own a company — except that the shareholders were four thousand households with passbooks, and their ownership had no price because it had never needed one. It sat in the equity of the institution, year on year, brick on brick. My Emil used to say the members owned the bank the way the congregation owns a church: quietly, completely, and without ever being asked to think about it."