Grant Whitfield stood up when he saw her. He was thinner than he had been, and he had let his hair go a little shorter, and he was wearing a plain blue tie. For a moment he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.
"Mrs. Arceneaux."
"Mr. Whitfield. This is Jaylen Broussard. He'd like to open an account."
Grant looked at the boy. The boy looked at Grant. Then Grant came around the desk and crouched down so that they were eye to eye, the way Odessa had seen good teachers do, and good drivers, and almost no bankers.
"Hi, Jaylen. I know your daddy. He's a good football player."
"He was," said Jaylen, with the disgust of a child for the past tense. "Now he does air conditioners."
"That's a good job, too. Maybe a better one." Grant nodded at the coffee can. "Is that your money?"
"It's four dollars and eighty-seven cents."
"Well," said Grant seriously, "that's a real deposit. Let's sit down and figure out where to put it."
They sat. Grant pulled up the screen. Odessa watched him. She saw him see the words on the screen — Heritage Starter Savings — and she saw him hesitate, and then she saw him turn the monitor, not toward her, but toward the boy.
"Okay, Jaylen. I'm going to be honest with you, because your Aunt Dessa here taught me to be." He did not look at Odessa when he said it. "This account here, the one we usually give people, pays almost nothing. If you put your four dollars and eighty-seven cents in it, in a year you'd have four dollars and eighty-seven cents. Maybe four eighty-eight." He tapped a different line on the screen. "But we started a new one last spring. It's for kids under eighteen who live north of the interstate. The bank matches the first fifty dollars you save, and it pays four percent, which is a lot better, and nobody can take money out but you and your daddy." He glanced up, at last, at Odessa, and his ears went slightly pink. "Ms. Moreau pushed it through. I just — I helped her write the memo."
"I'm not his aunt," Odessa said. "I just drove half his family to school."
"Is four percent good?" said Jaylen.
"It's good," said Odessa. "It's a real investment."
Jaylen considered this with the gravity of a man buying a house. Then he pushed the coffee can across the desk with both hands, the way he had seen grown people slide things across counters on television.
"Okay," he said. "That one."
Grant took the can. He counted the coins out on the desk, slowly, out loud, with Jaylen counting along, and when they reached four dollars and eighty-seven cents he wrote it on a deposit slip in neat block letters and turned the slip around and slid it back across the desk so Jaylen could sign his name. It took Jaylen a long time. The J was backwards. Nobody corrected it.