than four million nine hundred thousand left. The check came by courier to her house on Opelousas Street in a stiff cardboard envelope and she signed for it on her porch in her housecoat, and the courier, a young white man with earbuds, said, "Have a good one," and never once looked at what he'd delivered.
She took it to Bayou Federal Credit Union that same morning and stood at the window while the teller, a girl named Krystal she had also once driven to school, called her manager and then her manager's manager. They had to call someone in Baton Rouge before they could take it. Then she went home and put the receipt on the kitchen table and sat down across from Lucien's chair and laughed until she cried, and then cried for a long time after she was done laughing.
"You never know," she said to the empty chair. "You old fool. You never know."
She kept three hundred thousand for herself, because she was not a fool, either, and she had seen what happened to old women who gave everything away and then needed a new hip. She put it in a real investment account, an index fund, with a fee-only advisor in Lafayette whom Mr. Sonnier recommended, a soft-spoken Vietnamese woman named Mrs. Tran who explained everything twice without once making Odessa feel she'd needed it explained the first time.
She sent her son in Atlanta enough to pay off the rest of his pharmacy school loans, and he called her and cried on the phone, which he had not done since he was nine.
And then she sat at her kitchen window every morning for a month and counted blue tarps.
* * *
"So here's how it's going to work," Odessa said.
She took one more sheet of paper out of the manila envelope. This one was typed. Mrs. Tran had helped her with the language, and Mr. Sonnier had read it over and changed four words and said it was the cleanest term sheet he'd seen from anybody who wasn't a lawyer, and some that were.
"The money goes into a deposit account here, in the name of the fund. It doesn't leave. It sits in your bank, earning whatever you pay on it, and you get to count it on your books, which I understand banks like very much. In exchange, the fund guarantees home repair loans for homeowners in the four census tracts north of Interstate 10. If one of those loans goes bad, the fund covers the first fifty cents of every dollar you lose. You lend, I backstop. Your risk on these loans is cut in half. And you get credit for it under the Community Reinvestment Act, which I also understand banks like very much, especially banks whose last examination rating was Needs to Improve."
Grant's head came up sharply.