My mother in law, Diane Whitaker, insisted we dress up for the bank. “You do not walk in with one billion dollars looking like you are buying groceries,” she said while smoothing the lapels of her cream blazer with practiced elegance.
I laughed at first because it sounded like one of her dramatic exaggerations, but the cashier’s check resting inside her designer purse made the situation impossible to ignore since the number printed on it read $1,000,000,000, the result of the recent sale of Whitaker Global Freight, the logistics company my husband Tyler and his parents had built over three decades in Dallas, Texas.
She explained that I was only accompanying her because Tyler had become too emotional after the sale and she wanted someone calm and reliable beside her while handling the paperwork. The banker who greeted us sat behind a polished marble desk with a tidy brown bun and a name tag that read Caroline Foster, and her polite smile carried the tight patience of someone who had already dealt with too many complicated clients that day.
Diane handled every word of the conversation while sliding forms across the desk with absolute confidence.