"You said something earlier," she said. "You said you tell people to keep it simple. You said you say that to your own mother." She tilted her head. "I want you to think about something between now and Thursday. If your mother had walked in here this morning, in her good suit, and sat in that chair, would you have given her the lollipop?"
She didn't wait for an answer. She hadn't expected one.
* * *
Tasha Moreau did not sleep much on Tuesday night.
She lay in the narrow bed in the front room of her grandmother's house on Lombardy Street, the room that had been her mother's when her mother was a girl, and listened to the blue tarp over the back half of the house breathe in and out in the wind. It made a sound like a big animal sleeping. She had grown up with that sound since she was eighteen. On bad nights, when the wind came off the lake, it snapped like a sail, and her grandmother would call out from the back room, Tasha? You hear that? and Tasha would say, It's just the tarp, Mawmaw, and they would both lie awake listening to it hold.
The first time they had applied for the loan, Tasha was nineteen and a sophomore at McNeese, and she had filled out the forms herself at the kitchen table because her grandmother's eyes were bad. They had asked for twenty-eight thousand dollars. They had been turned down for insufficient collateral. The second time, two years later, they had asked for twenty-two, and been turned down for debt-to-income, because her grandmother's only income was a Social Security check and a small pension from thirty years in the cafeteria at Washington-Marion High School. Tasha had cried in the parking lot of the Ryan Street branch, in the old building, under the old roof.
She had taken the job there eight months ago anyway. Her friends thought she was crazy. You're going to work for the people who turned your grandma down? But it was the best-paying job she'd been offered out of McNeese, with benefits, and she had thought — she had honestly thought, sitting in the orientation with her new lanyard — that maybe if somebody from Lombardy Street was on the inside, things would go differently.
In her third month she had helped an elderly man from Pine Street fill out a home restoration application. She had sat with him for an hour and gone through his tax returns and his deed and his photographs of the damage and she had believed, with her accountant's brain and her whole heart, that his application qualified. She had put a note in the file saying so.
Two days later, Grant Whitfield had called her into the glass office.