The address belonged to a handsome building downtown, a company name in brass by the door, the kind of place I had never had reason to enter. I asked at the desk for the man whose name the bank had finally given me, and a tall fellow in shirtsleeves came down himself, and when he saw me his eyes went bright.
His name was Victor, and twenty-seven years ago he had been nobody at all. A young man with a good idea, a failing shop, and a bank that would not lend him a dime.
Then a woman he barely knew, a customer who came in for thread and buttons, had quietly written him a check that saved everything. My Lorraine.
She never asked for interest. She never asked for a share. She told him to pay it back when he could, however he could, and to tell no one, least of all her husband, who she said worried enough about money as it was.
So Victor paid. Every month for twenty-seven years, a little into an account under the name of Lorraine, long after the loan itself was square, because he said a debt like that is never really paid, only honored.
She believed in me when no one on this earth would, he told me, and everything I have, this company, these jobs, my whole life, grew out of a check she wrote on faith, so the least I could do was never let her account run dry.
The deposits stopped the month she passed, because Victor did not know why they had gone unanswered, only that something must be wrong.
I told him. I told him the woman who saved him had lived a long good life and gone gently, and that she had kept his secret so well her own husband thought the account was just her rainy-day savings.
It had been raining on somebody, all right. It had been raining on the whole future of a young man, and she never said a word.
Victor employs sixty people now. Sixty families fed by a business that would have died in its cradle if not for my wife and her quiet faith in a stranger. He walked me through the whole floor, introduced me to workers by name, and told each of them, plainly, that they had a job because of my Lorraine.
He asked what he could do, now that she was gone. I told him to do for some other young nobody what Lorraine did for him, and to tell no one, the way she liked it.
He is already looking, he says, for the right person to believe in. I think Lorraine would call that the only interest she ever wanted.