You Don't Love This Man Read Online Free PDF

entered the bank. Her diminutive stature and boyishly short hair lent her apixie quality enhanced that day by the immaculately pressed beige pantsuit she wore as she crossed the lobby to where I stood just inside the door. “You don’t need to be here,” she said in a stage whisper.
    â€œBut I don’t need to be anywhere else,” I said. “So tell me what happened.”
    â€œIt was standard,” she said, as if disappointed. “A middle-aged white guy in a gray suit came in right after we opened. He passed a note to Amber that said he wanted twenties and larger, no devices, so she gave him what was in her drawer. Then he apparently told her he wanted the cash in her safe, too, which she didn’t even have to unlock, because she’d just come from the dispenser and was still putting her straps away.”
    I was surprised to note a healthy number of freckles scattered across Catherine’s cheeks. She’d been working as a service manager in my branch for ten years, but that was the first I’d seen of freckles, and they further confirmed my belief that she was rarely more than a costume change away from Peter Pan. And had she really hidden her freckles beneath makeup every weekday for a decade? The thought was unsettling. “How much did he take?” I asked.
    â€œA little over six thousand. Amber’s still shaky, but she’s toughing it out. Charlotte and Tina are thrilled, I think. They’re telling their versions right now, but neither of them even has a hair out of place from the thing.”
    Across the branch, two uniformed police officers stood with Charlotte and Tina, the two other tellers who had been working that morning. The first officer listened as Tina gestured excitedly while Charlotte nodded in agreement. The second officer took notes on a small pad.
    â€œDid you see it happen?” I asked.
    â€œNot really,” Catherine said. “I was sorting the mail. I just saw there was a man at Amber’s window, and then he left and she started crying.”
    â€œWhere is she?”
    â€œIn your office.”
    From the bank’s front door to my office was a walk across a vast, yellow-carpeted space. The building was a rectangular box the size of a gymnasium, constructed in the golden banking days of the 1960s, when the location supported a staff of more than thirty. The vaulted ceiling was twenty feet overhead, and leafy trees outside brushed massive plate-glass windows that lined the upper half of the main wall. In the old days, smokers lit up at their desks without a second thought, and half of the managers, all of whom were men, ate lunch at the steakhouse down the street, trying to keep their ties clean while they enjoyed red meat and martinis before returning for the abbreviated banking afternoon. Those days are mere legend now, of course—the scrivening of daily credits and debits has shifted to centralized processing locations where documents and figures are run twenty-four hours a day by employees who have no contact with the public. The staff I managed in that building numbered only eight, more than half of whom were college students working less than twenty hours a week, and who didn’t particularly care if their cash drawers balanced at the end of the day. If they lost their job at the bank, they could get a job that paid just as much at any number of mall stores. And banker’s hours had disappeared years ago. Normal operating hours at my branch were nine to six Monday through Friday, and ten to three on Saturday. That the place was open at all on Saturdays struck me as absurd, an overt corporate strikeagainst the sanctity of the weekend, but I never complained. Because to whom? These decisions are handed down from Valhalla.
    When I stepped into my office, I found Amber seated on the cranberry-colored love seat against the wall. She straightened as if caught in some indiscretion. Her eyes were red and swollen, there