The Lobby My Husband Built

I sat with that feeling a while, and while I sat with it I kept coming back to a story Ward told me maybe a hundred times, because it was the closest that plain man ever came to telling me what he believed. When they were chartering the bank in 1971, one of the men on the committee, a banker’s son from the county seat who thought he was doing us a favor, wanted the new bank to keep what he called a quality clientele. He wanted a minimum balance to even open an account, high enough that the hired men and the tenant farmers and the widows getting by on a little would not qualify. He said it in a meeting, out loud, that some people were not worth the bank’s time. And my Ward, who almost never raised his voice, stood up and said that a bank that would not hold a poor man’s forty dollars had no business holding a rich man’s forty thousand, and that if that was the bank they wanted to build he would take his corner and go home. He gave the corner for a dollar on one condition, that nobody with an honest dollar would ever be turned away from that door. I had married a man who built a whole institution around the idea that there is no such thing as a person not worth the time. And here I sat, three years a widow, holding the phone, about to use the thing he built to teach a foolish young man that some people, the ones with the big accounts, had better be treated carefully. It was exactly the lesson Ward tore down a room to prevent. I put the phone in my lap.

And then I heard Ward. Not really, I am not claiming a ghost. But I have been married to a man for fifty-one years and I know exactly what he would say, and what he said, in my kitchen, in my own head, was: Leona. What was that room for.

What was that room for.

It was not for me to have power in. Ward gave that corner away for a dollar precisely so that no one person would ever be able to hold the town’s own bank over the town’s head. If I sank that branch and ran off that foolish young man to soothe my own humiliation, I would be using Ward’s gift as a weapon, which is the one thing he built it to never be. The whole point of a warm room full of people who know your name is that it is warm for everyone, even the fools, even the people who have not learned yet what it is for. Especially them.

So I did not make the phone call I wanted to make. I made a different one.

I called Elgin Whitaker, and by then he had already heard, because Lynette had called the regional office in tears within the hour, and half a dozen customers had called after her, because it turns out you cannot walk Leona Barnhart out of the Fenmore bank at nine-forty on a Tuesday without the whole town knowing by noon. Elgin was beside himself. He had driven the ninety minutes and was sitting in his car outside my house before I finished my sentence, practically. He came in, and he sat at my table, and he told me Preston Kohl would be terminated that afternoon and did I want to be there, he thought I had earned the right to be there.