The Lobby My Husband Built

His name is Preston Kohl. He came to us last spring from the regional office, sent to be the new branch manager after our Colleen retired, and I tried, I truly did try, to give him a fair shake. He was not from here. That is not a sin. Plenty of good people are not from here. He wore very good suits and very white shirts and he had a way of talking that was all forward motion, growth and metrics and cross-selling and something he called “optimizing the customer footprint,” and I did not know what most of it meant but I could tell it did not have much room in it for a Tuesday chair by the window.

The signs came slow. First he took the coffee urn out of the lobby. Efficiency, he said, and liability, hot coffee and old people. Then the good chair by the window went, and two others, replaced by a single hard bench angled toward a rack of brochures about home equity lines. He put up a big screen behind the tellers that played advertisements. He started having the tellers ask everybody, every single transaction, whether they had considered a premium savings product, so that a thing that used to take two warm minutes now took eight cold ones, and the line backed up, and the regulars stopped lingering because lingering had stopped being pleasant. I watched him hollow that room out a piece at a time, the way you would if you thought a bank was a store and a lobby was wasted square footage that ought to be selling something.

I kept coming anyway. Stubbornness, mostly. And because Lynette was still there, and Delmar was still there most weeks, and we would sit on that miserable hard bench like two kids kept after school and make each other laugh. I thought, this too shall pass. I thought, he will move up and move on and the next one will be a human being. I did not understand yet that to Preston Kohl I was not a customer he was failing to serve. I was clutter. I was a slow-moving obstacle between his lobby and the clean, transactional, profitable space he pictured when he closed his eyes.

It came to a head on a Tuesday in June. I remember it was hot already by nine-thirty and the air conditioning felt good, which is part of why I stayed sitting after my little transaction was done. Delmar had a doctor thing and had not come, so I was on the bench alone with my thermos of my own coffee, because they had taken the urn, watching the door for anybody I knew.