“It’s all right. We’ll have carrot soup.”
By the third Saturday, he’d stopped apologizing for every mistake. By the fifth, he was tying up tomatoes without asking. By the eighth, he had dirt under his fingernails that didn’t come out on Monday.
“My staff noticed,” he told me, grinning, showing me his hands. “Shelly asked if I’d been digging graves.”
He worked the teller window every Thursday. In his jeans and his gray T-shirt and his Dollar General sneakers.
The first Thursday, nobody knew who he was. Customers came up to the window and looked at him the way he’d looked at me. A young man in a T-shirt. They were polite, mostly. But a few of them asked, “Is the manager in?” Like they wanted somebody more important.
“I’m the manager,” he’d say.
They didn’t believe him.
One man from the city, passing through, asked to see Brandon’s ID before he’d hand over his deposit.
“He made me show him three forms,” Brandon told me that Saturday, pulling weeds. He laughed. But it wasn’t really a laugh. “I didn’t have three on me. Just my license. He said, ‘You can’t be too careful.’”
“How did it feel?”
Brandon stopped pulling weeds. He sat back on his heels in the dirt.
“Like I was eight years old,” he said quietly. “Standing in that bank in Chicago. Holding my grandmother’s hand.”
He looked at me.
“I didn’t know it would feel the same,” he said. “Even now. Even knowing I’m the manager. Even knowing I’m wearing these clothes on purpose. It still felt like they were looking right through me. Like I wasn’t a person.”
“Now you know,” I said.
“Now I know.”
He changed things at the bank that summer.
Little things.
He took down the sign that said THREE FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR ALL CHECK CASHING. Heartland’s corporate sign, from the policy manual. He called Des Moines and argued with the compliance people for two weeks. In the end, they agreed: for existing customers at the Millbrook branch, one form of ID would do.
