Kyle stood there with his empty hands hanging, and something in his face came apart and came back together in a better arrangement, and he said, "Thank you, Mr. Freeman," and Otis said, "Otis'll do," and shook his hand — one shake, with the key in the fist of it, ringing faintly against his wedding band — and the yard made the sound a yard makes when it has been holding its breath since 1985.
Walter watched it from the podium steps with his hands folded, and nobody was looking at him. That was as it should be; he had arranged it that way with some care.
Afterward there was barbecue, and music from somebody's radio, and the moment — Andre's idea, executed with Rachel's stopwatch precision — when the twenty of them got into the twenty cars, the widows riding high and straight in theirs like queens in a parade nobody had had to die for, and made one slow circuit of the yard, headlights on in the broad daylight, while three generations stood between the folding chairs and clapped them around and the horns answered in ones and twos, like men clearing their throats.
Evening came down the way it does in Dallas in October, all at once and then in layers. The chairs got stacked, the tent canvas came down in long sighing folds.
Imani took Rosa's portrait down off the easel herself and carried it to the office door flat against her chest, like a tray, like a person, and Walter was grateful past language that the young sometimes simply know the liturgy without being taught.
"Leave mine," Otis said, when the rides began to be sorted.
"Leave the first one where it sits tonight. I want to look at it a minute in the morning before I get in. A man should meet a thing like that fresh."
He turned his key over once in his palm.
"But I'll take a ride in it now, if the owner's offering."
"The owner," Walter said, "is at your service," and they went together to the head of the long row, to the first of the twenty, and Walter opened the passenger door for his oldest friend and closed it with the soft, expensive *thunk* that money buys and care deserves, and went around and got in behind the wheel of a car so new it still smelled of the factory's idea of leather.
They drove out of the yard with the windows down. The evening air came in smelling of creosote and hot concrete cooling.
Otis rode with his elbow out and his good hat on his knee and the key — his key — still in his hand, and neither of them said anything for the first mile, because they had been friends for fifty years and had long ago used up all the silence that needed filling.
At the light on Second Avenue, Otis said, "Take the long way."
"I was taking the long way," Walter said.
The long way went past the corner of Ervay and Canton, and Walter slowed for it without being asked, the way you slow passing a church you were married in. There was a parking garage there now, six stories of gray concrete, a coffee place at its foot with its lights coming on.
But under the garage there had once been a gravel lot with a chain across the front and a hand-painted sign, and a boy of nineteen had parked cars there six nights a week through one whole winter and one whole spring: running for men in the rain with the keys held high and dry under his cap, putting every dollar in a coffee can under Rosa's sink, toward a truck of his own.
He had parked, by his own exact and unforgotten count, eleven hundred cars on that corner before the coffee can had a truck in it.
"Eleven hundred cars," Walter said, slowing nearly to a stop.
"Right there. That's where the first truck is parked, still, far as I'm concerned."
"Under all that concrete."
"You counted," Otis said.
"I count everything. It's a sickness."
"It's a religion," Otis said.
"There's a difference, but it's a small one and it charges admission."
He turned the key over in his hand, the ribbon blue in the streetlight.
"You know what that boy on the lot would've said, if you'd told him it'd come to this? Twenty of them."
"In a row. With his name on the gate."
"He'd have said I was lying," Walter said.
"He'd have been right to. He didn't know anything yet about who was going to be standing next to him while it happened."
"That was the whole education, right there. The truck was just tuition."
They rode the rest of the way in the good quiet.
In Otis's street the porch lights were coming on up and down the block, and at Otis's house — the little brick house he'd bought in 1991 and paid off in 2009 — the light was on over the door, his daughter was on the porch with a dish towel over her shoulder, two of his grandsons were on the steps, and the screen door was propped wide with somebody's shoe, because the whole house had been expecting him and had arranged itself, without instruction, into the shape of a welcome.
Otis got out slowly. He stood a moment holding the door, an old man in a brown suit, with a new key in his hand and his whole history lit up on a porch.
"Walter," he said.
"Otis."
"Forty years, and I still can't figure how I got hired by the best man in Texas off a gravel lot."
"You weren't hired off a gravel lot," Walter said.
"You were *recognized* on one. There's a difference, and it charges admission."
And Otis laughed — the full laugh, the one from the portrait's edge — and closed the door soft, and went up the walk to his people, and the screen door banged behind him like a period at the end of a long, true sentence.
Walter sat a moment in the idling car, watching the porch.
Then he drove home through the darkening streets, toward a house where the light would be on — because Imani had gone ahead of him, because Andre had called her, because that is what they did now, the whole wide freight of them, without being asked.
A man drives a lot of cars onto a lot of lots in seventy-six years, and the world will try to tell him, every day of it, that what he's worth is what's under him when he rolls in — the shine of it, the price of it, the newness of the paint.
Walter Jennings had been counted that way once, three weeks gone, by a young man who has since learned better at a wash bucket, and he had answered it in the only arithmetic he trusted.
Because he had known since he was nineteen, parking other men's cars in the rain with the keys held high and dry under his cap: a man is not worth what he drives onto the lot.
A man is worth who is waiting for him when he gets there — porch light on, door propped open, somebody standing in the light saying his name like it is the whole of the news.
By that measure, the only one that has ever once been accurate, Walter Jennings drove home the richest man in Dallas, in the first of twenty black cars, with the windows down and the whole evening coming in. — The End —