"Well, that's terrific." He was nodding again. He had not, she thought, heard the second sentence. "So shall we go ahead and get you set up? I just need a photo ID, and we'll do a little paperwork, and you'll be out of here in fifteen minutes." He opened a drawer and took out a glossy folder with the porch-swing couple on the front and slid it across the desk. "And that's yours to keep. There's a lollipop in there, too. Little joke. We give those to the kids."
Odessa looked down at the folder. There was, in fact, a lollipop taped inside the flap. It was green.
She did not touch it.
Instead she opened her purse, unzipped the inside pocket, and took out the manila envelope. From the envelope she took out the deposit slip. She laid it on the desk, face down, on top of the glossy folder, and with two fingers — the same two fingers she had once used to slide a bus pass back across the fare box to a boy who'd tried to hand her someone else's — she slid it across the desk to him and turned it over.
"I already filled one out," she said. "To save time."
Grant picked it up with the easy, practiced boredom of a man who looked at two hundred deposit slips a week.
Then he stopped.
She watched him read it once. She watched him read it again. She watched the pen come down from his lip and land, very gently, on the desk, and roll an inch, and stop.
In the box marked AMOUNT, in square upright blue letters that a nun at Sacred Heart would have approved of, she had written: $4,500,000.00.
In the box marked ACCOUNT NAME, she had written: The Lucien and Odessa Arceneaux Rebuild Fund.
Below that, on the line marked MEMO, she had written six words: For the ones you turned down.
Grant Whitfield's face did something complicated. It went pale and then pink, and his mouth worked once without producing anything, and when the sound finally came out it came out in a high, strangled register she had never heard a grown man use in a bank.
"That's — " he said. He cleared his throat. "That's — that's quite generous."
* * *
Odessa folded her hands on her purse.
"Generous," she said. "Now, that's an interesting word. Why do you say generous, Mr. Whitfield?"
He stared at the slip. He seemed to be reading the memo line for the third or fourth time, and with each reading something in his posture went a little more slack, like a tire with a slow leak.
"I — I just assumed," he said, "with the account name, the — 'rebuild fund,' I assumed you were looking to — is this a charitable — a donation, to the bank's foundation, or —"
"No, sir. It's not a gift. Not to the bank, anyway."
"Then I'm not sure I —"