“Or none,” Brandon said, “if Shelly knows you.”
Compliance didn’t put that in writing. But everybody understood.
He put the peppermint bowl back on the counter. The glass one. Shelly found it in a box in the storage closet. He filled it every morning himself.
He started learning customers’ names. He wrote them in a little notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. Earl Lindquist. Ruth Abernathy. Marlene Voss. Miguel Ruiz.
He went out to visit the farms. He started driving out once a week, in his jeans and his sneakers, to walk the fields with the farmers who had loans. He didn’t know anything about farming. He asked a lot of questions.
“He asked me what a combine was,” old Earl Lindquist told me at the diner, shaking his head. “A grown man. A bank manager. Didn’t know what a combine was.”
“What did you tell him?”
