Gulf Coast Heritage Bank's Community Reinvestment Act rating in the spring was Satisfactory. Lorraine called to tell her. "Next time," Lorraine said, "I'd like Outstanding." And Odessa said, "So would I," and they both meant it.
Grant Whitfield was not fired. He stayed at the Ryan Street branch through the spring and then, in the summer, asked Lorraine for a transfer, not up but sideways: to the bank's small branch on Broad Street, north of the interstate, in a strip mall between a Family Dollar and a beauty supply. It had been losing money for years. It had a broken sign. Lorraine, Tasha heard, had asked him twice if he was sure.
Odessa heard about it from Alcide, who heard it from Marcus, who had apparently been getting coffee with the man once a month.
"Hm," she said.
"That's all you got to say? Hm?"
"I'm reserving judgment."
"You been reserving judgment on that man since November."
"That's because I drove a bus," Odessa said. "You don't decide about a boy in one year. You see what he looks like at the end of the route."
* * *
At the end of the route, as it turned out, was a Tuesday in October, almost a year to the day after she had first sat down in the glass office on Ryan Street in her funeral-and-courthouse suit.
She did not wear the suit this time. She wore slacks and a cardigan, and she drove the Buick north instead of south, onto Broad Street, and pulled into the strip mall between the Family Dollar and the beauty supply. The broken sign had been fixed. Somebody had put two concrete planters full of red geraniums on either side of the door. In the back seat, buckled into a booster that Odessa had bought at Walmart for the occasion and would not admit had cost forty dollars, sat Alcide Broussard's great-grandson, Marcus's boy, Jaylen, six years old, holding a coffee can with both hands.
"Is this the bank?" Jaylen said.
"This is a bank."
"Is it the bank where Paw-Paw got his roof?"
"It's the same bank. A different door." She unbuckled him. "You got your can?"
He held it up. It rattled. In it were four dollars and eighty-seven cents in coins, accumulated over the summer from returning Barq's bottles that Alcide had saved in the carport, and from the tooth fairy, who had been unusually generous in July, and from his great-grandfather, who paid him a quarter every time he could name a Clifton Chenier song from the first three notes.
The branch was small and bright. There were two tellers and a welcome desk and one glass office at the back. The jar on the welcome desk was full of red-and-white peppermints. A young man Odessa didn't know greeted them, and when she said they would like to open a savings account, he did not glance at her clothes or her age or the child, but just said, "Yes, ma'am, right this way," and walked them back himself.