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Show 383 on Flower Street. The following Monday he was given his own teller stamp, his own cash drawer, his own window. His stomach was in knots all day, and when he balanced his cash after the bank closed he was short by fifty dollars. When he was neither arrested nor fired he felt better, but he knew that Mr. Acton was revising his opinion of him, and would watch, from a distance, saying nothing, until the devil either stepped in and took another fifty dollars or decided to let him dangle a little longer. On Tuesday his cash balanced perfectly, and Janet asked him if he could give her a ride home. Janet was twenty years old and divorced and had a one-year-old and wore stockings that had runs all over them. At first Lorin had thought she just snagged a new pair each day, but then he realized she had no other kind. On Wednesday he felt badly done by when a large woman with pink hair and expensive gloves presented him with a check drawn on the Sunset branch in Pacific Palisades and he said he would have to clear it with his supervisor and she called over Mr. McCaffrey from the officers' platform who told him in the hearing of all the other tellers on the line that Mrs. Snyder had a savings account in the Westchester branch that would curl his toes so please cash her check like a good boy. On Thursday he looked up in the middle of the afternoon when someone cleared his throat and was frightened to see himself standing at his window, facing him, looking bored and irritable with pale blue eyes and a brown beard. He looked down at the check that the other Lorin had slid across the counter like a holdup note and realized that it was only Floyd, who had grown a beard since the last and only time they had met, and that Floyd seemed not to recognize him. He cashed Floyd's check and counted out the bills on the counter without directly looking at him again, and said as little as |