Saint drove eighty-five miles along Highway 177, past tallgrass hikers as she headed toward the red-roofed limestone Chase County Courthouse. She parked her sedan in front of the First Kansas Bank and saw Cottonwood Falls locals glancing her way.
She was ushered through to a back office where she met with a girl no older than nineteen. Toothy smile and thick brown hair, her name tag read Dawn, and her nails were painted bold red like her lips.
“You mind if I eat lunch while we talk?” Dawn said, unwrapping a sandwich so thin it couldn’t have held much filling. She took a bite and frowned. “Sticks to the roof of my mouth so I might lisp my way through this.”
A tall man returned with a tape and handed it to Saint, threw a glance at Dawn and headed out.
“He wants to date me,” Dawn said. “His family own farmland, which he’ll inherit. Fuckin’ smell of those cows.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” Saint said, meeting her eye and trying to keep it.
Dawn set her sandwich down and smiled. “Now that was a boy I could date.”
“A bank robber?”
Dawn clutched her chest, all theatrics. “He didn’t rob nothing but my aching heart.”
Saint rolled her eyes.
“I mean, it was a while back now, but I think about it each and every day. He came in and I was alone, which ain’t unusual on a Wednesday morning. And he walked up to the counter and he smiled…and this wasn’t no ordinary smile. I mean it lit the place. He wore this cap, kinda like a flat cap, sort of khaki.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he was going to rob the bank,” she said, smiling wide.
“You weren’t scared?”
“You could tell he was decent, and I know how that sounds. He didn’t even draw, just opened his jacket a little. And this gun was…like it was beautiful. And his jeans were tight and—”
Saint held up a hand. “What else did he say?”
“I opened the cash drawer and there weren’t many bills, so I was scrambling for the key to the other, and then he looked past me at the photograph on the wall. You see it? It’s my parents and me when I was small, the day they took the bank over from my grandmother. And this boy, he starts asking me about it.”
“Asking you what?”
“I told him it was tough, you know. We’re a family bank and we only hold local money, and the farming community, the slaughterhouses and feedlots, they’re producing, but no one’s buying. Wheat prices and all that. Kansas farmers don’t feed the world no more.”
Saint saw the first hint of sadness beneath the glitz and the ditz.
“He just listened as I talked. And it…you know how boys just stare at your tits….” Dawn glanced at Saint’s chest and winced a little.
Saint sighed.
“I mean this boy was listening to me. And he had this skin, kind of like gold, and his hair was a little blonde but darker, and I’ll bet behind those dark glasses his eyes were—”
“So you handed him the money and then called 911?”
Another smile, this time knowing, considered. “That’s the thing. He didn’t take nothing. Just left the bills on the counter and walked out.”
“He left the money?”
“And me.”
Another sigh.
“I wouldn’t even have reported him neither, but they check the tapes, you see.”
She followed Dawn into a small back office where the tall guy fed a security tape into the machine.
“Y’all about to watch the beginning of a love story,” Dawn said.
When she saw him, Saint couldn’t help but smile. She reached a hand out and stopped short of touching the screen. Her heart heavy, her mouth dry at the realization. She had known it, but seeing him, like that.
“What the fuck did you do, kid?” Saint said, quiet, to herself.