"You will be." She reached into her tote bag and took out a thick brown accordion folder, the old-fashioned kind with the elastic cord, the kind she had kept her route sheets in for twenty-nine years. She set it on his desk next to the slip. It made a soft, heavy sound. "Before we get to what the money's for, let me ask you something. You don't have to answer. I'm just curious. What would you have recommended to me, Mr. Whitfield, if you'd read that slip first? Before you decided who I was?"
He opened his mouth.
"Don't," she said, not unkindly. "I already know. You'd have offered me coffee again, and this time you'd have gone and got it yourself. You'd have called somebody named Chip or Trey from wealth management and put him on the speaker phone. You'd have used the word portfolio. You would not have given me a lollipop."
"Mrs. Arceneaux, I really apologize if I gave the impression —"
"You didn't give an impression. You gave a recommendation. Point-zero-one percent. You told me real investments were for a different kind of client." She tapped the slip. "I want you to remember that. Not because I'm angry. Because it's going to matter in a minute."
He was looking at the accordion folder now. She saw his eyes go to the labeled tabs, which she had written out with the same blue pen: BROUSSARD. GUILLORY. SIMIEN. MOREAU. LEDET. JOSEPH. CHAISSON. FONTENOT. There were twenty-three tabs.
"What is that?" he said.
"That," said Odessa, "is the reason I came to you instead of anybody else."
She undid the elastic cord and opened the folder and took out the first letter, from the tab marked BROUSSARD, and laid it in front of him.
It was on Gulf Coast Heritage Bank letterhead. It was dated March of the previous year. It thanked Mr. Alcide J. Broussard for his application for a Home Restoration Loan in the amount of twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars and regretted to inform him that his application had been declined. The reason given was insufficient collateral value relative to requested amount. At the bottom, above the printed words Branch Manager, was a signature in expensive blue ink: a big looping G, a big looping W, and a line between them like a man drawing a horizon.
She laid the second letter beside the first. GUILLORY. Thirty-one thousand. Insufficient collateral value. The same signature.
The third. SIMIEN. Eighteen thousand. Debt-to-income ratio exceeds program guidelines. Same signature.
The fourth. LEDET. The fifth. JOSEPH. She did not hurry. She laid them out in rows, like a hand of solitaire, until his desk was covered with them and the glossy folder with the porch-swing couple had disappeared beneath the paper.
"Twenty-three households," she said. "That's just the ones that would give me their letters. I know of thirty-eight more. North of the interstate, all of them. Most of them are people I drove to school, or whose children I drove, or whose grandchildren. Mr. Broussard is eighty-one years old.