SEDUCED

By D. L. Johnson and Elizabeth Ridley

Tenacious, novice banker, Rian Reston, rises from a broken family to be bilked out of an immense sum in a small Colorado mountain town. He's fired. Without money, friends or family, he contemplates suicide. At the last moment, he gets menial work on a failing cattle ranch. While there, he meets his mentor, Reggie, who hires Rian. 

Unbeknownst to the two, the bank employing them is owned by Scaratucci, a mobster using it to launder money. While working at the bank, Rian meets tree-hugger Missy and her friend, Tablita, a Native American woman and US Senator. Meeting Missy changes everything Rian knows and feels about love.

Then, a long nation-wide power outage hits America. It inspires Rian to seek a solution to the fragile bank payment system, Rian uncovers ancient deep layers of bank deception in plain sight, with bankers pretending to take in deposits they lend in their communities. Scaratucci's bard-quoting hitman is turned loose when Rian learns how to prevent payment pandemonium in predatory banks, as happened in 2008. To carry it out, Rian and Missy start a political movement.

Tablita presents Rian's idea to Congress and his testimony before them, raises his stature in the media's eyes. Following his idea, the legislation threatens to end the mafia's money laundering and banks harming people. Congress and the vacillating President are caught up in the public's protests who are mad as hell. Public protests demand Congress pass the proposed Public Payment Act, creating a secure payment system without private banks. That spark turns Rian's grassroots movement into a raging prairie fire that sweeps the county.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350927184

D. L. Johnson

D. L. Johnson graduated from New Iberia Senior High School in southern Louisiana. He set out to write children’s books based on the moralities his mother instilled in him as a child. Now a father with children of his own, he wanted to pass on those values not only to his kids but to other children through positive reading. He thanks the family and friends who believed in him and dedicates this book to his two beautiful daughters, Zoria and Tamarin. They are his inspiration.

Book preview

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SEDUCED

©D.L. Johnson

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35092-717-7

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35092-718-4

This novel is dedicated with love to

Maria

&

Jeni

without whom it would never have seen the light of day

Collaborator Jenifer Marie Webster

Edited by Elizabeth Ridley

"Only love can produce the right revolution. Every other form

of revolution, economic, social and so on, only breeds disorder, more confusion…"

J. Krishnamurti

"We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated

in a few hands, but we can’t have both."

Louis Brandeis

"The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is used to

disguise truth or evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"I sincerely believe... that banking establishments are more

dangerous than standing armies."

Thomas Jefferson

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

PROLOGUE

America was in the Roaring Twenties, a giddy, gilded age when the 1929 stock market crash ended crazed bank borrowing and betting for overnight riches. It led to the Great Depression’s deadly, desperate deprivation that Rian Reston thoroughly studied in history at college. The possibility of having another devastation like it lit a fire in him. Thousands of banks failed when depositors demanded their cash back. It forced President Roosevelt, in 1933, to shut banks down. That ended their gambling with depositors’ money. Gold-backed money ceased domestically that year too, allowing the Federal Reserve to put more money in the cash-starved economy. But, it didn’t end the Depression; the Second World War did, which ignited the nuclear risk of human extinction.

After that carnage, America prospered in the fifties with world-beating manufacturing. Other nations owed the US for supplying weapons and soldiers in two world wars. Afterward, the government-issued GIs came marching home to buy affordable homes and begin families. The nation had a large, well-off middle class with political power. Most wives stayed at home caring for the family. Husbands were more than just breadwinners and children played in safe schools and neighborhoods. Families were strong and wholesome. Few expected free lunches or free rides in life. Home buyers had mortgage-burning parties to celebrate getting a bank off their back. Banks were dignified, quiet, and boring. As newly invented television arrived, frozen TV dinners followed. Family ties weakened.

In the rock-and-roll sixties, buying did not consume consumers, and money hadn’t ascended to godlike status yet. Wall Street was a world financial leader. Hollywood films, Detroit automobiles, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s influenced all the world’s cultures. America owned the twentieth century, with its world-dominating dollars and its dream was still in sight.

Then—like a streaking meteor from a dark sky, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon shocked the world by ending the redemption of US dollars for gold. That created new freedom for the nation’s benefit. Or harm!

As the shock reverberated, profit-mad industrial magnates began shipping jobs, not products, overseas. Wages stagnated. And predatory banks rose in power globally with a dominant dollar. Subtly, the wheels began coming off America’s car-crazed culture. The middle class ebbed as the Soviet Union’s Cold War collapsed to end the last vestiges of the Second World War. Three centuries of European dominance died. Businesses began skimping on quality and grew less loyal to workers whose allegiance to the man faded. Unions lost power.

Into this sweep of history, Rian was born before the twentieth century came to a close with credit-dependent Americans struggling to make ends meet. Bank risks soared. Caution did not. Computers and the Internet, with an endless memory, went mainstream to speed their subversion. Trust and confidence in immense institutions and leaders faded.

Careening out of control, the 2008 great financial crisis crushed debtors who couldn’t pay. Then, with the bank payment system in jeopardy, the government bailed out banks with mammoth money manufacturing—unrestrained by gold or taxes! For the complicit bankers, there was no jail time, which angered citizens who were not bailed out. In the resulting recession, millions were fired and banks seized homes. No greed-is-good heads of banks rolled.

Vagrancy grew. Dissent mushroomed in the nation’s gender-contentious un-green environment. As America’s exceptionalism and God’s army waned, surveillance subtly squirmed into ordinary lives enhanced with artificial intelligence’s frightening and promising capabilities.

Amid America’s angst, Rian Reston, from a broken home with an impoverished mother, risked everything to prevent a doomsday nightmare. One like the heartbreaking Great Depression on steroids.

CHAPTER 1

In 2003, Rian Reston, eight, went to a seedy Chicago bar with his stepfather, Lothar, after school. Afterward, Lothar would take Rian home for a beating, as usual. His caring, loving mom, Sasa, too, if she intervened.

That day he would beat neither. He would not go home; Rian would.

As usual, Lothar Gravestone sat drinking at the bar, ignoring the off-shift workers shaking off rain-drenched jackets as they came in from a squall slashing off Lake Michigan. Nor did he notice the condensation dripping off an old, red, neon beer sign fogging the bar’s windows or the dim lights casting a sickly mustard light from years of exposure to cancerous smoke.

The ramshackle joint’s muggy, stale air, like Lothar, reeked of alcohol and tobacco. Head down, in sweat-stained work overalls, scruffy-faced Lothar drank away the loss of his job that day, one beneath his self-appraised skills.

Only clicking pool balls split the silence between bragging players before they left in a booze-fed buzz. Laborers next to Lothar were oblivious to him. They were talking trash about da Bears’ prospects of making the playoffs. Lothar ignored them, and young Rian, leaning against the wall, steeled himself for a beating. Even at his young age, he felt the futility of life under his stepfather’s domination and anger toward his mother and himself.

Edgy, Rian watched Lothar and Scaratucci, the boss who’d fired Lothar, at the other end of the long bar.

Army veteran Lothar sat with a cigarillo dangling from his lips, fueled by cheap, whiskey-darkened thoughts. His shock of fair hair and complexion revealed his northern European heritage. For such a stocky body, he had a narrow face with a thin, straight nose—unrealistic, given how many fights he’d had.

At the end of the bar sat his foreman, second-generation, black-venomous-eyed Scaratucci. He didn’t respect Lothar for the precision skills he’d learned in Amsterdam, the city of Lothar’s birth. Lothar hated the low-wage, mindless job and Scaratucci, who was always on his back—not knowing he was mafia.

A third beer with whiskey had Lothar riled at life’s unfairness. Staggering to his feet, he looked into the bar’s mirror. He saw a smug look on Scaratucci’s sallow face.

Ironically, not seeing himself as an immigrant, Lothar said, It’s not fair, to the bartender wiping off the copper countertop. The lazy, damn immigrants take our jobs and boss us Americans around.

Accustomed to hearing alcohol talk, the bartender didn’t respond.

Lothar crushed out the ever-present cigarillo hanging from his lips and slammed the shot. On a mission, he lurched to the end of the bar behind Scaratucci.

Without a word, Lothar pulled Scaratucci around and smashed his nose with a burly fist. Then, burying the other fist in his stomach, he said, This is for you, you bastard.

Scaratucci doubled over, blood gushing from a crushed nose, pulled a stiletto, and lunged at Lothar. Lothar dodged the knife. He grabbed a weighty bar stool and crushed Scaratucci’s knee, who fell writhing in pain. Lothar jumped on him and was choking him when the bartender with two others pulled him off. They held Lothar down while another called the police. A squad car from the twenty-first district responded. An ambulance followed.

Although understanding little of how it would affect him, Rian watched with a flush of pleasure, seeing police take Lothar away in handcuffs. He watched Scaratucci groaning in pain, carried out on a stretcher, not grasping how this man would play a larger role in his life than Lothar. With confused emotions, he was grateful to the police, who took him home to his mother, Sasa. She broke down when he told her, in worried relief and pity.

No money for bail. Lothar sat in jail until trial. The judge sentenced Lothar to twenty years for assault on Roberto Scaratucci.

It relegated maimed Scaratucci to shuffle for a lifetime with a misshapen knee over a cane. The Italian mafia’s blood boiled with vengeance. He vowed to exact a pound of flesh, whatever the cost.

CHAPTER 2

Dit-dit-dit-daaah! The ominous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the predawn morning woke twenty-eight-year-old Rian. His phone showed unknown caller. Sleep-addled, he answered, Ahhh...hello.

This is Officer Colin Walsh, of the Chicago Fourth District. Are you Rian Reston?

Mmmm...yes, sir.

I’m sorry to say, your mother, Sasa Reston, is dead. We found her body near the Forty-first Street Pedestrian Bridge. Evidently, she lived nearby. She died of exposure.

Shocked, heart pounding, he asked, What…what…happened?

The officer read a dry clinical report to him. The words fell on deaf ears; he felt alone, his gut ached.

The call ended. In anguish he thought, Why? I think Mom had an apartment when I spoke to her a few weeks ago. I know COVID caused her to lose students, but she said nothing about not being able to pay the rent or eviction. Damn it.

Rian sat dazed, recalling Sasa’s sister Bernadine. A banker had duped Bernadine and her husband, Bob, with a thirty-year, adjustable-rate mortgage when buying a house in Cleveland. When the 2008 bank failure happened, they lost their home and jobs. They killed themselves that year. Losing his aunt and uncle devastated then-thirteen-year-old Rian. In Rian’s mind, the bank killed the only family he had other than Sasa. It hurt.

Drifting back to his mom, he couldn’t believe he wouldn’t see her again, or hear her soft, loving voice or melodious cello. He wept. Rian loved her so much. It paralyzed his brawny, athletic body. Rian expected to wake up from a nightmare. He didn’t. He raged at bankers, vowing to end their control of people’s lives, payments, and life-sustaining credit.

In the kitchen, he sat, blotting out his anguish with bourbon in a Dollar Tree glass. Mind anesthetized, he stumbled to bed to lie staring up at the dingy cottage-cheese ceiling, until overcome with sleep.

The next morning, the sun crept above the tops of the snow-covered trees turning the tangerine sky into a spectacle over the mountain ridges. Sadly, after a fitful sleep, banker-in-training Rian woke too depressed to see it. His head was a blur of painful, disconnected childhood memories. With little sleep, he rose from the tattered bedspread and sat on the edge of the bed feeling empty, missing Sasa. She was his anchor in the disheveled, fearful life he lived under the ironfisted rule of his alcoholic, ever-absent stepfather.

Now he was alone, living in quiet, laid-back Steamboat Springs, a small Colorado mountain town. It was a complete contrast to the bustling city of Chicago where he grew up.

He showered, dressed, and walked out into the biting wind of a crystal-clear morning light. The high-altitude, thin air seared his lungs. Slogging mechanically through the sidewalk’s mushy, late-spring heavy snow, he shook off a hangover, feeling numb. Then, for no apparent reason, he stopped. Unsteady. Standing in slush, his cement brain pondered his nightmare: no family, no friends, and pitiful pay on a treadmill to nowhere. Sasa and his sweet aunt Bernadine losing their housing to the bank seemed to start Rian’s crusade.

Above him, the sky was a stupendous tint of ice blue over jagged Mount Werner, named the two-mile-high mountain after Olympic gold-medalist skier Buddy Werner. Out of his sight, energized skiers were floating down through fourteen inches of fluffy champagne powder that had fallen the night before.

One could sense how the Old West inspired Steamboat with buildings of faded glory that thrived on snow and tourists. The former Ute tribe’s hunting grounds were now a tucked-away small town that produced world-class skiers who sought medals. Discovering one could slide downhill on a couple of slats had put Steamboat on flat-lander tourist agendas and spawned an industry of billions.

Rian trudged through the snow. He stopped in front of the drugstore window, feeling he wanted to punch it out. What now? Angst, anger, and aspiration bore through every fiber. A meaningless, servile job awaited him at the bank. Yet it was the best job of his wage-slave life, with steady, decent pay. He could have sent her some money.

If he didn’t have the job, he’d either have jumped on skis for an adrenaline high, blasting through powder on black diamond slopes, or gone to the gym. There he’d find a guy to box, give a few punches, take a few; it didn’t matter.

His athletic body was molten lead, mind frozen. Everything had a pink tinge through his bloodshot, pale-aquamarine eyes. His mom, Sasa, was his only family. She was always there for him and Lothar, his strange stepfather who wasn’t there for either of them. Ever.

At the end of the workday, head reeling, Rian sat in his apartment recalling the South Side Chicago neighborhood where his mom raised him. Sasa instilled his love of history by reading history books to him. She was an attractive, petite, submissive woman. She had a quiet, pleasant way about her with gentle, blue-gray eyes and bushy, almost waist-length hair the color of pale, dry wheat. Of Scottish ancestry, she was forever brushing her hair.

Lothar’s beatings and sexual abuse of Sasa made her subservient. Even at a young age, Rian would get between Sasa and Lothar when Lothar was beating her to protect her. Beating was Lothar’s sick way of satisfying himself and subliminally when Sasa admitted to him that Rian was another man’s child. He’d often told her he would kill her and the boy if she called the police. Sasa had, until then, acted like many victimized women. She’d been unable to stop the abuse yet unwilling to leave. Rian recalled his stepfather during Christmas or holidays. Those times with him were brief truces from habitual hostilities or beatings that did nothing to improve his attitude.

The contrast between Lothar beating him and Sasa’s kindness instilled Rian’s deep sense of caring for others. Her needless death inspired him to end people dying for lack of essentials. Even with much to learn, his fire to do it was lit.

Sasa had little money and no easy-to-spend credit or debit card. Every penny counted. She only had or used cash. As the first of the month approached, she and Rian’s rent anxieties grew. Landlords evicted them often. They had no certainty of where, what, or when they’d be eating...or if it was a miss day with nothing to eat. He grew up hungry for food and knowledge of the world.

Because of Lothar’s erratic employment and unsavory past, qualifying for welfare was a sometime thing. With Lothar incarcerated, they qualified for help. Hospital emergency rooms were their healthcare plan. Their retirement plan was dying. They saw middle-class things like a car, a secure home, and eating regularly as luxuries.

It was normal for Rian to attend school without breakfast. The school lunch program had to sustain him until he came home. Skipped meals stretched their meager food supplies, as did food banks and government food stamps. She made a can of tuna or a jar of peanut butter go a long way. By the time strong-bodied Rian was competing in athletics at high school, her concern for him going hungry dogged her. Her frail body paid the price of missing meals.

Unpaid bills made them susceptible to debt collectors, often with criminal pasts. One advantage of their rough neighborhood: few bill collectors wanted to risk their lives going there.

Tired, uncomplaining, Sasa was always there for Rian. Since becoming a teenager, he always had two jobs and no complaints of effort because he loved his mom’s gentle, loving ways with him. It amazed Rian how she could endure Lothar.

The day Sasa died, she had $14.52 in her bank, a coffee can. She had no bank account because it was such a hassle getting to the bank with no transportation, and banks had costly overdraft fees they couldn’t pay. It always worried Rian that she dealt in cash, so easy to rob.

Rian wanted so much to earn enough to get a decent little house for Sasa, with no worries for necessities. Reality seemed to crush Rian’s dream of making a better, fairer world for all those who worry every day about a roof over their head and other basic essentials; that aspiration was born when he inherited her love of humanity. He was heartsick. There was no funeral or memorial service for his mom; he couldn’t afford to go, and she had no family other than Rian. The State of Illinois cremated her.

Months later, he received her death certificate, showing that she died of exposure. It triggered his memory of the curving, snaky bridge next to a bunch of railroad tracks. Not knowing gnawed at him. Life felt pointless. No family. No close friends. Like others his age, he was on a heart-crushing treadmill. No hope of owning a home, building a future, or having a family. Even having good enough credit to apply for a credit card or have a mortgage on some small part of the American dream was beyond his means.

CHAPTER 3

Since graduating with a college degree in history, voracious reader Rian hadn’t had a steady job. He’d been a ski bum enjoying the splendid skiing offered in Steamboat. That was life until meeting Erin. She and he worked as ski lift operators and hung out after work. She told him about a job opening at the Yampa Valley bank, where her father worked. That night, he updated his résumé.

When the bank opened the next day, Rian was there, shaved, showered, and dressed in his best to apply for the job. It surprised him to get an interview. He knew his education—with an athletic scholarship at the University of Missouri—didn’t fit the job opening.

However, Manager Ansom Dullshott liked his sincerity, aggressiveness, and his kind, America-boy smile. Rian was stunned to be called back. The manager, having few applicants with a college education, hired him. Dullshott felt his head loan officer, paunchy Tom Shew, could train a bright, personable guy like Rian. Within weeks, Rian had manically studied banking, passed a mortgage loan originator’s license exam, and a criminal background check.

After the early morning police phone call, walking to work, Rian gathered his energy to mask the devastating news of his mother’s death. He walked aimlessly, kicking at snowbanks in frustration, while walking to the bank. There he went to the employees’ breakroom, where he pulled off a faded beige scarf to hang up with the threadbare, secondhand overcoat his mom had bought him for graduation. He touched the coat, feeling her loving presence. Pangs of sadness seeped through his gut. Life felt unreal.

In the bathroom, he combed his somewhat curly, unruly blond hair, splashed water on his face, dried off, and straightened his tie in the mirror before going to his desk. The town was bustling with skiers carrying skis, anticipating their day on the hill. Head throbbing, he didn’t notice.

Speaking to no one, he glanced at the Steamboat Pilot, Steamboat’s newspaper, then checked his emails. He pulled folders out of the file drawer and glanced through loan applications for vacations, remodeling, trucks, etc., he had been working on.

For Rian, the loan applications were mostly a meaningless blur of legal gibberish written by eager, billing-in-six-minute-interval lawyers covering every imaginable future event, short of the world ending, to protect the bank. Rian was going to find out its fastidious attorney covered even an apocalypse with what the law called force majeure, an act only god almighty could bring about to prevent someone from fulfilling their obligation. Rian’s well-pickled, grieving gray cells made the complicated, dense legalese even less intelligible.

Before he could focus on the documents, a tall, thin, sun-wrinkled man wearing a broad, sweat-stained Stetson hat and weathered Levi’s held up with a dark, discolored belt with an oversized, tarnished Native Indian-made squash blossom silver buckle on it, strode straight through the lobby to Rian’s desk, as though he knew him.

Rian rose to meet him. The man’s leathery face was craggy with gray hair sticking out from under his hat. A nasty scar on his bulging, veiny neck caught Rian’s attention of this local rancher from an old family in the Elk Valley who extended a crusty hand to the neophyte banker, saying in a deep drawl, Good mornin’, son, I’m William Satzwell. Folks in these parts call me Bill, while gripping his hand.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Satzwell. I’m Rian Reston. Please sit down.

Bill pulled a chair up to the desk and dropped his hat on it.

With little enthusiasm, thinking Satzwell wanted to borrow money to fix his truck or buy a few head of cattle, Rian asked, What brings you in, Mr. Satzwell? What can I do for you?

I need a loan.

Fine. May I ask for what, sir?

Like many who worked the soil or tended animals around Steamboat, he came straight to the point. He said, For improvements, repairs, a new irrigation ditch headgate, and buying more cattle, son.

Then, handing him a long, handwritten, yellow-lined tablet with a breakdown of estimated costs, he said, The total estimate comes to around a million and a half bucks. I added a bit on thinking I ought to have extra in case I’ve overlooked something; if the lumberyard jacks up prices or cattle prices go down such that I don’t make a profit off the critters. To be sure, I’d be obliged to borrow it. Ma cowhands and such agreed to stay on this winter to help until the cattle business gets active with calving and all.

Accustomed to loans in the five-to-ten-thousand-dollar range, Rian felt a surge of adrenaline when he said, It’s a fortune you’re wanting to borrow, Bill.

Shifting in his chair, he said, It is, but I’m good for it. Me, my pa, and family have been’a borrowing in this here bank since you was in diapers.

I’m sure you have, sir, Rian said, pulling out loan application forms, if you’ll just complete these, we can start the process. What will you be pledging for security on the loan?

My family’s longstanding reputation ‘round these parts should be good enough, don’t ya think, and the property and our cattle?

I don’t know. We will look into it.

Crusty old Satzwell rose, and said, I’ll be a’having my attorney look over the application. With a firm handshake, he left.

Rian was stunned. A million-and-a-half-dollar loan! His head buzzed with excitement. He wondered, does the bank have that much to loan Satzwell? Like most, Rian did not know how banks had money to loan, he just knew, somehow, they did. He assumed they loaned out other customers’ money.

Rian, of course, had practically no authority to loan even a bank pen without a supervisor’s approval.

CHAPTER 4

The buzzing intercom jerked Rian, lost in thought, back to the million-and-a-half-dollar loan.

What did the good ole boy want? blurted Rian’s supervisor, who had seen Satzwell enter the bank. Come talk to me before you do anything.

Nervous, he went to meet head loan officer Tom Shew, his boss, to discuss the loan request.

Portly Tom Shew was in his late fifties with streaks of silver in the hair bordering his broad head. He had a well-trimmed mustache; wide, odd-shaped, bushy eyebrows sloping upward at the ends with a round face and a propensity for wearing bland, ill-fitting pinstripe suits. The suits made him resemble the dignified city banker he claimed he’d been in Boston. His face wore a perpetual squint from looking at the fine print of unnecessarily long legalese loan documents.

Tom had in actuality been a debt collector, a repo man, chasing deadbeats. They had shot at him several times. He had a crooked left arm from a guy taking a Mercedes from a chop shop he was repossessing. Now he did repo with the law—paper and pen.

Rian explained his meeting with Satzwell and asked, Tom, does the bank have one and a half million dollars to loan?

With an air of casualness, he said, Son, we can do it. Don’t ya worry about it. Let’s get back to work. Check out da’ value of the property he’s using to back the loan, okay?

Incredulous, Rian returned to his disheveled desk to sit in a stupor, realizing how little he knew about bank credit or modern money. That night Rian began keeping notes on banking in a notebook, resolved to learn enough to explain it, first to himself and then to others.

***

Rian’s mind wandered back to his mom and playing linebacker for the Missouri Tigers. He had found relief from worrying about her on the football field, in classes, or by working at his part-time job. Often after the games, he’d sit with moist eyes at his locker, thinking of his mom waving goodbye to him on the bus as he left for the university. A part of him felt like he’d abandoned her. Another part recognized that education was the path to being able to provide for her and himself. Sasa was kind. She wanted the best for him, regardless of the cost to herself.

Being a strong, rugged, two hundred and twenty pounds, Rian seemed to have it all: good looks, an easygoing personality, smart, and insightful beyond his years. However, he had doubts of self-worth and ever-present money worries. His wild blond hair fit his fearless outward bring it on attitude. He was fond of wearing T-shirts clinging to his muscular chest and fitted Levi’s when not in banker suit and tie.

Every sacrifice Sasa had made without complaint for Rian made him even more determined not to fail her. He recalled her compassion in telling him life is a wondrous, beyond-imagination miracle and gift. She had Gandhi’s quote taped to the refrigerator: "Live as if you will die tonight. Learn as if you will live forever." Listening to her gentle, loving voice and the music emanating from the beloved cello she played were great joys for Rian.

At college, the first time away from Sasa, like many, he had meaningless recreational sex. He had no time for genuine relationships—just one-off transactions with cheerleaders or hormone-driven women, who enjoyed hanging with or hooking up with testosterone-crazed gridiron gladiators. Scoring, for the smack-talking jocks with their brains hanging between their legs, was in a girl’s end zone.

When off the field, not studying, he worked at a pizza shop in Columbia near the campus, a job the coach found for him. With no connections or a well-off family, the guys didn’t invite him to join fraternities or the one percent’s social clubs.

Scholarships like his didn’t pay living expenses, so free unlimited meals provided to the athletes or employee pizza were staples of his diet. In high school, he had the size, speed, and athleticism, but not the weight. His mom couldn’t afford meals he needed to be competitive weight-wise. However, a college