I think about the teller a lot. I genuinely do not think she was a bad person. I think she was just the latest in a long line of people who looked at an old woman in orthopedic shoes with fifteen dollars and made a calculation. A fast, careless, completely human calculation.

I’ve made that calculation too. I know I have. I just usually don’t have to watch what it looks like from the outside.

I went back to that branch a few weeks later. I don’t know why, exactly. I guess I wanted to see if there was anything different about the place. A photo on the wall. A plaque. Something.

There wasn’t anything. Just a normal bank.

But when I got to the front of the line, I paid attention to the person behind the counter. Really paid attention. The kind where you look at them and think: I don’t know a single thing about what this person has carried into this building today, or what they’ve given up, or what they’ve been quietly building for forty years that I will never hear about.

That felt like something. I don’t know if it counts for anything. But it felt like something.

Mrs. Delgado was probably back on Friday with her fifteen dollars.

“Small things become.”

Yeah. I think she’s right about that.