Each day he woke up and put on the same thing: black pleated slacks, a blue button-down shirt, black belt, and black wingtips.  Sometimes, out of necessity when he’d gotten behind on the laundry, he substituted a pair of charcoal gray pants.  They were dark enough that no one could really tell they weren’t black unless they inspected them closely, and no one at the bank branch where he worked had said anything the few times he’d worn them.  Still, he preferred black, because that’s what it said in the dress code for tellers: men–blue dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes.

Each day he walked the same way to work, crossing the same streets at the same intersections, always turning at the same corners.  He found an apartment within a mile of the branch six weeks after he took the job.  He could take a bus, but buses were inconsistent.  By the time he walked to the stop, waited for the next one to come, and suffered the stops and turns and traffic, he could have gotten there by foot anyway.  He read once that the engineers who planned the city’s traffic light system timed them so that if cars traveled the same speed, right around the limit for a given street, on a perfect day with no traffic they could pass through a green light at every intersection.  He was now convinced the same rule applied to pedestrians, and personal experimentation seemed to support that theory.  If he walked each block at a brisk pace, he could always reach the next street just as the light started blinking so he could cross the street at the last possible moment.  Hence, he never darted across the street against the light or eased out into the intersection just out of the path of cars like bike messengers did, not out of respect for traffic laws, but because it would throw off his timing.  So each day he walked at his brisk pace and timed every light and hardly ever had to stop and wait to cross a street.

Each day he unlocked the outer doors to the branch’s vestibule, punched a security code into the keypad on the wall inside, and swiped his ID badge to open the set of inner doors.  They were heavier than the first set of doors, and much harder to pull open.  He often held them open for old ladies or parents trying to navigate a stroller through the doors while he was working his daily shift as Greeter, the employee responsible for roaming the foyer and directing customers to the appropriate teller window or service desk.

Each day he turned on the lights in all the public areas of the branch, unlocked the restrooms, and started brewing a pot of coffee for the customer waiting area.  When he first started working at the bank, his manager, Michelle, had set up a rotating shift of employees who opened the branch and took care of these menial tasks.  The other employees hated it, but seeing a chance to ingratiate himself with the boss, he volunteered to open every day in exchange for an extra day off.  No one seemed to mind.

Each day he logged into one of the computer terminals behind the teller windows, entered his ID number, and clocked in.  The time card system wasn’t tied to his paycheck in any way–he was on salary–but he took personal pride in clocking in early every day.  His sheet consistently read 8:56 a.m., 8:54 a.m., 8:49 a.m., 8:57 a.m.  He forgot to clock in one day (he wasn’t physically late, of course) and he was mortified.  He offered to work extra time to make up for it but Michelle dismissed him with barely concealed annoyance.

The days at the branch progressed with the same rhythm of his daily routine.  Business was brisk right after the bank opened, then ebbed through mid-morning until it picked up again during the lunch hour, as workers in the surrounding office buildings came by to deposit paychecks, make transfers, and ask questions about their accounts.  He had never worked for a bank before ATMs and online banking were widely available, but he was impressed by how many people still insisted on face-to-face, physical exchanges of currency and signed slips of paper.

Each afternoon around 3:00 p.m. Mr. Gurupanchayan, the owner of the sundries shop next door, brought over cash and change from his register to deposit and recycle into the proper denominations for making change the rest of the day.  “Call me Guru,” he said when they first met, but the teller politely declined.  He was fond of Mr. Gurupanchayan and enjoyed chatting about his business, but the employee handbook explicitly stated: Always address customers by their proper names.  Besides, he was rather proud of having learned to pronounce his name in full.

Each day at a few minutes past 5:00 p.m. (he didn’t want to make it look like he was watching the clock), he entered his ID number in the computer again and clocked out.  He had offered to help close the branch too, but that was strictly the manager’s job.  He said goodbye to Michelle as she tallied up the totals from each cash drawer and keyed in the day’s final reports.  After that, he walked home, following the path of his morning commute in reverse order.

Each evening he made dinner for himself in his studio apartment, something simple like pasta or tuna salad or a frozen dinner.  He also made breakfast for dinner sometimes as a treat: scrambled eggs mixed with fried salami and two pieces of toast.  On Thursdays he usually ate at the diner across the street from his apartment building because they had a soup and sandwich special.  He liked their BLT with turkey chili.

After dinner, he watched whatever sitcoms or law dramas were on network TV, sometimes folding laundry on the bed or setting up an ironing board and pressing his blue shirts and black slacks.  When he hung up his shirts, he always glanced at the gold tie hanging on a hook by the closet door.   He bought it for the day he was promoted to branch manager.  Male managers wore black suits too, but he didn’t want to spend the money on that just yet, plus he worried that the one he bought might not fit or go out of style by the time he needed it for work.  The tie was a good enough motivational tool for the time being.

Each night he read a few pages of a mystery novel in bed.  He had heard reading at night was a good way to wind down and get a good night’s sleep.  He didn’t particularly enjoy the novels, but he got free copies from a book swap in the lobby of his building.  Thrillers and romance novels were usually the only ones left.  When he felt sleepy, he double-checked that his alarm clock was set for 6:00 a.m. and closed his eyes so he could wake up the next day and start all over.

The branch was decorated with posters on the walls and signs in standalone metal brackets advertising the bank’s services, like no-fee checking for college students or prime plus one home equity lines of credit.  The signs were populated by a multiethnic cast of professional models hired to associate banking products with stylish and attractive people.  He helped Michelle rotate the signs each month as the bank ran promotions, and after he worked there a few months he started to notice the same models in different ads: the young African American man with scholarly black-rimmed glasses on the student loan promos, the pretty redheaded woman with striking green eyes hugging a freckle-faced toddler for the mortgage products.

One Monday, Michelle asked him to help with a new set of posters.  He used a box cutter to slice through the packing tape around the plastic cap at the end of the heavy cardboard tubes, and slid the new posters onto the carpet in the waiting area.  He unrolled them one by one, placed them face down, and set boxes of envelopes on each corner so they would flatten out enough to fit into the display frames without warping.  He didn’t even look at the pictures, assuming they were the same smiling, satisfied faces.

He picked up the stack of new posters to distribute around the branch.  They had labels but he knew where each one went just by the size: the banner was for the wooden frame behind the teller counter, the two small ones went in the glass cases on each wall of the vestibule, the movie poster fit in the black plastic frame mounted on the front window.

The last two posters were for the standalone metal bracket that they set near the front doors each day.  He dropped one in the slot on the top of the bracket–a regular, the Asian father and son gesturing at a computer screen to promote their online bill pay server.  He spun the bracket around on its post, took the last poster from under his arm, and looked at it for the first time.

It was a new face, one he decided on the spot was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.  She had flawless skin, the color of the iced lattes Michelle made him fetch sometimes in the summer, and dark brown hair that was pulled up in the back but left a few strands to fall down and frame her face.  She wore a white sweater and clutched a scarf at her chin in a way that, although the rest of her body was out of the frame, made her look like she was hugging herself.  She smiled a demure half-smile, her lips lined with a burgundy shade that perfectly complemented her skin and hair color.

He felt flushed.  He felt that flush of adrenaline that pulses from the top of the stomach and warps the inner ear with the sound of a dying cymbal crash.  He stared at the picture for a moment and only moved to drop it into the metal stand when his hands trembled and the poster started to make noise.  He turned the frame so that her picture was facing inside the branch, then stepped back.  The poster advertised a credit card rewards program, but he just stared into her brown eyes, narrowed slightly with that smile.

He didn’t stop staring until Michelle called him over to start counting out change for the morning rush.  He turned away from the poster and walked over to the counter where Michelle was stacking rolls of coins in the tellers’ drawers.  He felt the woman’s eyes on his shoulder as he walked away, and turned to see her smiling at him again.  This time instead of simply staring, he smiled back.

The rest of the day he glanced at her face every chance he could.  When he finished work, he stopped again on the way out to move the metal sign off to the side of the foyer, ostensibly so the cleaning crew could mop the tile floor.  He paused before he let go of the side of the frame and closed his eyes to make sure he could still see her face after he left.  He wanted to know her.  He wanted to know more about her.  He knew in his head that she was just a model hired by an ad agency but he wanted to meet her and talk to her and ask her out for a BLT and turkey chili.  He kept that picture in the front of his mind the whole way home.

He couldn’t remember when he started saying hello to the picture in the morning, maybe by the end of the first week she arrived, maybe not until the next week.  He did so only when he unlocked the branch by himself, and even then so quietly that no one else could have heard him.  He liked the feeling that she was there waiting for him.

He couldn’t remember when he decided her name was Maria, because by the time he did it felt so natural that her name couldn’t have been anything else.  She could have been Indian or African American or Vietnamese or Filipino, ambiguously ethnic like all the non-white models in the ads, but he decided she was Hispanic.  He once had a crush on a Hispanic girl named Marisa in high school, maybe that was why.  But Maria just seemed right.

He started thinking about Maria at home, what it would be like if she were waiting for him there every day instead of at the branch.  He pictured them having dinner together, watching TV, reading together in bed.  He never thought about sex.  In fact, he never pictured her wearing anything other than the white sweater and scarf from the poster, and the most he ever touched her in these daydreams was pressing against her shoulder on the couch or when she patted his chest after straightening his yellow tie for work.

He stole looks at the poster while he worked, smiling back at her like they were sharing an inside joke.  A couple weeks after Maria arrived, Michelle told him he needed to take a day off the following Monday.  He never used his vacation days voluntarily, so she just scheduled them for him.  He spent that Monday at home, finishing laundry and cleaning his apartment.  He cooked spaghetti for dinner and ate alone in front of the TV, thinking about how nice it would have been to share it with someone.

When he opened the branch the next day, the metal stand holding Maria’s picture wasn’t off to the side of the foyer where he usually put it at the end of each day.  He assumed Michelle or one of the other workers had moved it somewhere else, but when he looked around the branch, he noticed the rest of the signs had been changed.  He panicked.  He felt that same pulse from starting from his stomach, but this time it finished with a tingling chill on the back of his neck.

When Michelle arrived, he asked her about the posters.  “Oh, we got a new batch yesterday.  Robbie and I switched them out.”  No, they didn’t save the old ones, they put them out with the recycling.  Why did he want to know?

He pretended that he didn’t know why he asked, just forget about it.  He tried to go about his day like nothing had happened.  He could still picture her face in his mind whenever he wanted, after all.  He kept this in mind during the morning rush, stopping between customers to close his eyes for a second and recall her smile.  But the busier he got, the harder it was to stop and do this without anyone noticing.  He kept looking over to the metal frame that used to hold her picture, now holding a grinning elderly couple wearing Hawaiian shirts and touting IRA plans, and felt his stomach clench each time.

That afternoon, when Mr. Gurupanchayan came in for change, he made a mistake counting the first time and had to start over.  He gathered up the stack of bills again and started counting out again: “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one.  Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two.  Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty …” He stopped.  He couldn’t remember if he had already counted out two hundred or three hundred.  He apologized profusely, and started again.  This time he got to the $10 bills, but lost track again.  By then Michelle had noticed and stepped in to finish counting Mr. Gurupanchayan’s change.  He smiled at both of them and said, “No worries, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Michelle asked him if he was okay, and he stammered an excuse about being tired.  Maybe he worked too hard cleaning his apartment yesterday, he said.  “You know what?” she said.  “Maybe you could use some more time off.  Why don’t you take off the rest of the day.”

He didn’t know what to say other than sure, thank you.  He clocked out on the computer, the first time he had ever worked less than a full day.  He walked home, crossing the same streets and turning at the same corners he did every day.

When he got home, he watched TV the rest of the afternoon, made himself dinner, then watched more TV until it was time for bed.  As he got ready for bed, he saw the yellow tie hanging by the door.  He took it off the hook, rolled it up, and put it in a dresser drawer.  Then he got in bed, read a mystery novel until he felt sleepy, and set his alarm for 6:00 a.m. the next day.

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