The shower was brief and hot. Walter dressed the way he had dressed for every significant piece of business he had ever done, which was the way he dressed every day, because he had never in his life understood why a man should own a second way.
Faded overalls over a clean work shirt, the shirt's collar soft as cloth ever gets, buttoned to the second button. Boots — scuffed, resoled twice, older than some of the dispatchers at the depot.
On the hook by the back door, his cap: dark blue once, now the color of weak tea, JENNINGS FREIGHT stitched over the bill in letters worn nearly to thread. He put it on and settled it the way a man settles a hat he's worn ten thousand mornings.
From the counter, his thermos — steel, dented on one side where it had fallen off a running board outside Amarillo in 1997 — filled with coffee from the same pot, black, no sugar.
He looked, if you had seen him from the street, like a retired man on his way to fix something for a neighbor. He looked like a man who had come to clean a gutter or estimate a fence.
He did not look like a man whose name was on two hundred trucks, or whose signature, that morning, would move a sum of money with a great many zeros in it across a wire. That was fine with Walter.
It had always been fine with Walter. The money had never once introduced him properly anyway.
The work had. The phone rang at seven-oh-five, which meant it was Imani, who had her grandfather's clock inside her somewhere and had never once in twenty-seven years been late for anything she considered important.
"Morning, Grandpa."
"Morning, baby."
He tucked the phone against his shoulder and carried his thermos to the table.
"You're up early to check on an old man."
"I'm up early because somebody has a nine o'clock appointment and a habit of leaving the house like he's going fishing," Imani said, and he could hear the smile in it, and under the smile the thing she shared with her great-grandmother, whose name she carried in her middle: the belief that love, properly organized, arrived with a checklist.
Imani Jennings was a CPA who ran the Jennings Family Foundation — scholarships for drivers' kids, a hardship fund that had quietly carried more than one family through a bad winter, the anniversary gala that she and Andre were building like a moon launch — and she was also the only other living soul who knew the whole of her grandfather's plan, because somebody had to hold the other end of the rope on the money, and when it came to money with a meaning attached, you wanted Imani holding the rope.
"Rachel Donovan has the preliminary paperwork ready at the dealership," she said.
"She's expecting you at nine. The fleet coordinator — that's her title, she's good, Grandpa, I talked to her twice."
"The wire is staged at the bank, it just needs your signature on the final invoice to release. Mr. Abernathy at the bank knows to expect the call and he knows not to—" She paused.
"He knows it's your business. I told him it's a vehicle purchase."
"Which it is."
"Twenty of them," Walter said.
"Twenty of them," Imani agreed.
"He's going to have a morning."
Walter laughed, a real one, and poured the last of the coffee.
"And your father?"
"Dad thinks you're buying a car."
A beat.
"One car. He's mentioned it twice."
"He said, and I am quoting, 'I hope he doesn't let them talk him into the undercoating.'"
"Undercoating," Walter said gravely.
"In Texas."
"I know. I didn't have the heart."
Her voice softened then, and lost the checklist, and for a moment she was not the foundation director or the CPA but the granddaughter who had ridden to the depot on Saturday mornings sitting up straight as a fence post in the passenger seat, being taught the names of the trucks like other children were taught the names of the states.
"Grandpa. Are you sure you don't want me there?"
"I could be there in forty minutes. I could just — be in the corner."
"Take notes. Nobody would even know I was with you."
"I know, baby," he said.
"And I love you for offering, and the answer is the same as yesterday. This one's mine to carry in. You and Andre built the party."
"This part—" He looked down the hall, toward the study, toward the wall.
"This part I do the way I did all of it. Myself, face to face."
"A man ought to be in the room when his name goes on a thing."
"I know," she said quietly.
"That's why I asked twice, so I could say I did."
They were silent a moment, the comfortable kind.
"Call me when it's done," Imani said.
"Not before. I know you."
"You'll want to tell it in order."
"In order," Walter agreed.
"That's the only way a story's worth anything."
"And Grandpa—" The checklist came back into her voice, but gently, the way you'd close a door you didn't want to slam.
"Eat something first. There's a difference between a man going to buy twenty cars and a man going to buy twenty cars on an empty stomach, and the difference is the second man makes better decisions."
"I ate," Walter said, which was not true yet, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and so he got up while they were still on the phone and took two eggs out of the refrigerator and set them where she could hear the shells against the bowl, and she said, "That's better," satisfied, and they said goodbye the way they always did — no ceremony, just "Love you, Grandpa," "Love you, baby," and the line going quiet.
He ate standing at the counter, the eggs and a piece of toast, looking out at the yard in full morning now, the pecan tree throwing its long shadow across Rosa's garden.
Then he washed the plate, dried it, put it away — Rosa's rule, and then his rule, that a house should be left in the morning the way you'd want to find it at night — and he got his keys off the hook, and the notebook out of the study drawer, because a man finalizing a thing like this wanted the names in his breast pocket, close to the work.
He slid it into the bib of his overalls and patted it once, the way he'd patted a bill of lading into the same pocket ten thousand times.
Outside, the air had October in it — Dallas October, which meant the heat had taken a step back and the light had gone clear and amber, and the whole street smelled faintly of cut grass and somebody's bacon.
The pickup sat in the driveway where it had sat for sixteen years: a 2009 Ford, silver once, now the color of a coin that's been in a pocket a long time, with a dent in the tailgate shaped exactly like the corner of a loading dock in Fort Worth and a crack in the windshield, low and on the passenger side, that had been there so long Walter would have missed it if it healed.
It had two hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and it started, as it always started, on the first turn — a little rough, a little loud, settling into a rumble that Walter felt in his chest like a second, slower heart.