"Mrs. Arceneaux," she said, standing. "Thank you for coming. And thank you for your patience. I want to say, before we start, that I've read these files. Most of them twice." She looked at the man who had come in on Odessa's arm. "And you must be Mr. Broussard."
"Yes, ma'am," said Alcide, who had put on a tie for the occasion, a wide brown one with a pheasant on it, and taken off his fedora at the door. "I was told there'd be coffee."
There was coffee. There was also Tasha, sitting at the far end of the table in a gray blazer with her hands folded so tightly on a notepad that her knuckles were pale, and there was Grant Whitfield, in a white shirt and no lavender tie, who stood when they came in and said "Mrs. Arceneaux. Mr. Broussard," and then sat back down and did not say anything else for some time.
Lorraine did not waste anybody's morning. She went through the term sheet line by line with Odessa, asking questions that were sharp and fair, and Odessa answered them, and when Odessa didn't know an answer she said so and said she would ask Mrs. Tran, and Lorraine wrote that down. They talked about the guarantee percentage and the reporting and what would happen to the money if the fund were ever wound down. They talked about the Community Reinvestment Act exam in the spring, and Lorraine did not pretend it didn't matter, and Odessa liked her better for it.
"I'll be honest with you," Lorraine said. "The deal is good. My credit people looked at it last night and they called it the best first-loss structure they've seen from a private individual. If you'd walked into my office in Baton Rouge with this, I'd have signed it in an hour." She set down her pen. "But you didn't walk into my office. You walked in here. And I think we need to talk about why."
She looked down the table.
"Grant called me last night," she said. "Grant, I'd like you to tell Mrs. Arceneaux what you told me."
Grant cleared his throat. He told them about the box on the appraisal orders marked Special Instructions. He told them about the six words. He said he had been taught to type them his first year, that it was how the branch had always done it, that he had never really thought about what they meant until he sat with the files on Wednesday night. He said it steadily, looking mostly at the table. When he got to the part about the barbershop with the plywood on the windows, Alcide Broussard made a small sound, not quite a word.
"I knew Henry," the old man said. "He cut my hair forty years. That's what you held my house up against?"