The letters sharpened one at a time and then all at once.

RESTRICTED.

Beneath it, in pen, was a date — the twenty-fourth of September, three weeks before she died — and a set of initials I could not read.

I sat in that car for a long time.

Because a stamp like that is not something a customer applies to her own book.

A stamp like that is something a bank does to a book when the book is in the bank, across a counter, in front of a teller.

Which meant that three weeks before my grandmother died, that passbook had been in First State Bank.