Odessa was very still.
"Who told you?" she said, though she knew.
"Mr. Whitfield." Tasha's voice was barely there. "He said underwriting makes the call. But I think — I don't know. I don't know, Miss Dessa. I don't know if it's just him or if it's the system or if it's — but the appraisals all come through the branch first. He picks the appraisal management company. He sends the order. He can write instructions on it."
"Can you find out?"
"I'm not supposed to be in those files."
"I didn't ask what you're supposed to do, baby." Odessa set down her Barq's. "Tomorrow at ten, every one of those twenty-three files is going to be on a table in front of the regional president, because I asked for them. You're going to be in that room, because I asked for that, too. You don't have to go digging. You just have to read what's in front of you, the way you always did. Can you do that?"
Tasha looked at the yellow house, at the fig tree, at the old man in the glider, who had turned Clifton Chenier back up and closed his eyes and was tapping the end of his cane on the porch boards in time.
"Yes, ma'am," she said. "I can read."
* * *
Grant Whitfield stayed at the branch until nine-thirty on Wednesday night, pulling files.
He had told his wife it was about a big deposit, which was true. He had not told her about the letters, or the lollipop, or the moment at the door when the old woman had asked him about his mother. He had driven home Tuesday night with that question sitting in the passenger seat of his Tahoe like a person, and had not been able to make it get out.
His mother was sixty-nine. She lived in a retirement community in Sulphur with a golf course and a clubhouse. She had been a dental hygienist. When she came into the bank — which she did, sometimes, to see him — he walked her to his office himself, and brought her coffee himself, and called her Mama in front of the tellers, and once, when she asked about putting some money into a CD, he had talked her out of it and into a managed portfolio with the wealth management team instead, because a CD, he'd told her, was leaving money on the table.
He had not given her a lollipop.
He sat at his desk in the empty branch with the lights turned down and the twenty-three files spread out in front of him the way the letters had been spread out the day before, and he read them. He hadn't read them before. Not really. He had signed them. There was a difference, and the difference was sitting in front of him now in stacks.