The old woman in the green cardigan stood up at her corner table, holding a folded letter, and the whole bar turned to look. My brother Kevin, still up on his barstool with his Guinness, lowered it halfway.
She told the room, in a soft voice everyone leaned in to hear, that two years ago she almost lost everything she had.
A man had called her claiming to be her grandson, in jail, needing bail wired right away, crying, begging her not to tell his parents. She believed him. She drove to her little bank branch in Dorchester to wire eighty thousand dollars, her entire life savings, the whole of what her late husband had left her.
The young woman at the teller window would not let her do it.
She stalled. She asked gentle questions. She said the computer was slow. She kept the old woman talking for forty minutes while she quietly called the police, because she knew the voice of a scam when she heard one. She held the old womans hand across the counter while the truth came out, while the woman cried in relief and shame and gratitude all at once.
That teller was Siobhan.
Somebody has to count the quarters, Kevin had said. He did not know those hands had held an eighty year old woman upright while they counted out everything she almost lost.
The woman in green unfolded her letter and read it to the bar. She had written that a bank teller in a 2011 Corolla had saved her from losing her home and her dignity in a single afternoon, that she had come to this party, invited quietly, to raise her glass to that young woman in front of the man who called her job a joke.
She raised her glass. Not to the room. To Siobhan.
Kevin, who owns half a block on Broadway, climbed down off his barstool and did not finish his toast. For once the developer had built nothing worth more than what his niece did at a teller window on an ordinary Tuesday.
Siobhan just smiled and sipped her cider and said, slainte, Uncle Kev. She still works that window in Dorchester. The woman in green visits every St Patricks Day.