The First National Bank of Enid had not been the First National Bank of Enid for nineteen years. It had been bought by a bigger bank in 2007, and that bank had been bought by a bigger one, and in 2016 the branch had closed. The building was still there on the corner of Grand and Broadway, two stories of pale limestone with tall arched windows and the words FIRST NATIONAL BANK still carved over the doors, though somebody had hung a FOR LEASE banner beneath them that had faded in the sun to the color of weak tea. The windows were dark. There was a crack running up one of the front steps.
But the parking spaces were still there. Six of them, angled, along the curb in front of the doors. And the one nearest the entrance still had a faded blue handicapped symbol painted on the asphalt, and a sign on a metal post, bent a little now, as if something had backed into it years ago. There were people on the sidewalk. Nora had told them ten o'clock. It was nine fifty-two when the first black Escalade turned the corner onto Grand, and they were all already there, and had been, some of them, since eight. They stood or sat along the sidewalk in front of the old bank in a ragged line, the way the twenty had stood in front of the freight terminal in the photograph. Some of them were old — very old — in their eighties, one in her nineties, in wheelchairs, on canes, in their church clothes or their work clothes. Some of them were middle-aged, sons and daughters, holding the arms of their parents or standing alone with their hands in their pockets looking uncertain, as if they were not quite sure they were supposed to be there. There was a young man of about twenty-five in a National Guard uniform. There were grandchildren running up and down the sidewalk. There were people who had just come to watch, a crowd of them, forty or fifty, from the stores along Grand and the houses on the side streets, because word had gotten around Enid over the last three weeks, the way word does in a town that size, and half the town seemed to remember Whitcomb Freight, and a good part of the other half had had a father or an uncle or a neighbor who drove for it. The line of black cars came slowly down Grand Avenue and pulled in, one after another, along the curb in front of the bank, and up the block, and around the corner onto Broadway, until they filled every space on both streets for a block and a half. One by one the engines went quiet. One by one the doors opened and the drivers got out — technicians in coveralls and a receptionist in a sundress and salesmen in shirtsleeves — and stood beside the cars, not knowing quite what to do with themselves. And Amos Whitcomb got out of the first car, slowly, with one hand on the door frame, and stood on the sidewalk in front of the First National Bank of Enid in his vest and his feed-store cap, and looked at the people waiting for him. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then an old man near the front of the line — tall, stooped, bald, in a western shirt with pearl snaps, leaning on a cane — called out, in a cracked, carrying voice, " Took you long enough, Amos. " And the whole sidewalk laughed. It broke over the crowd like a wave, and the old people were laughing, and some of them were crying while they laughed, and the grandchildren stopped running and stared at the grown-ups in confusion. Amos laughed too, his head going back, that big rough rolling laugh, and he walked straight down the sidewalk to the old man with the cane and put his arms around him, and the two of them stood there holding on to each other in front of the bank while the crowd laughed and clapped. " Dewey," Amos said into the man's shoulder. " Dewey Lambert. You old goat. " " Thirty-eight years," Dewey said. " Thirty-eight years I been carrying this thing around. " He let go of Amos with one arm and fumbled in the pocket of his western shirt and brought out a small, soft, yellowed rectangle of paper — the back of a fuel receipt from a Phillips 66 in Shamrock, Texas, dated December 1986, with the ink on the front long since faded to nothing. On the back, in pencil, square and blunt and forward-leaning: OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb. " My wife told me to throw it out in 1990. I told her, Mavis, that man has never broke his word to me yet. She said, Dewey, he is never going to buy you a Cadillac. " His voice cracked. " She passed in '21. I wish she was here so I could tell her she was wrong. " " Tell her anyway," Amos said. " She'll hear you. "
Nora had brought a card table. She set it up on the sidewalk in front of the bank doors and put a white tablecloth on it, and on the tablecloth she laid out twenty sets of keys, each one with a paper tag on it bearing a name. And beside the keys, she laid a pen. It was a fountain pen, black, old, with a gold band around the cap. It had been June's. She had used it to write checks and letters and grocery lists and Christmas cards for fifty years, and she had used it, on the back of the photograph of the twenty, to write God help us.