CHAPTER 19
"Then that's the date." Amos turned back to Dale. "These cars get delivered the week after that young man gets his license. And his name goes on every one of those twenty buyer's orders as the salesman. Every one. Whatever the commission comes to on twenty Cadillacs at cost, I don't care. You pay it to him. If it comes to nothing, I'll make up the difference out of my own pocket."
"Sir," Luis said. "Sir, I can't — I didn't do anything. I gave you a bottle of water."
"You gave me a bottle of water," Amos said, "and asked my name, and shook my hand, and told me the truth, and tried to warn me that I might get treated bad. You did all that before you had any idea who I was or what I wanted. That's not nothing, son. That's the whole job. Ask Dale's daddy." He nodded at the photograph on the wall. "He'd have hired you on the spot."
Dale Harmon looked at Luis for a long moment. Then he wrote something on the pad in front of him, and underlined it twice.
"He's hired," he said. "Salesman, effective the day he passes. Desk on the floor. I'll put him next to Brent."
"Put him somewhere better than that," said Amos, and for the first time since he had come into the room, he smiled.
* * *
Tyler stood in the doorway through all of it, holding his clipboard against his chest.
He did not say anything. Nobody spoke to him and nobody looked at him, except once, near the end, when the old man turned in his chair to talk to Luis and his eyes passed over Tyler on the way. They did not stop. They just passed over him, the way you pass over a piece of furniture in a room you already know.
Tyler had never been looked at like that before in his life. Or — no. That was not true. He had been looked at like that hundreds of times. He just had never been on the other end of it.
He stood there and listened to the story of the twenty, and the cold garage, and the scrap of cardboard in the church parking lot, and the old man's voice, rough and low and steady, telling it. He looked at the seventeen pieces of paper laid out on Dale Harmon's desk in the last of the light. He looked at the old man's hands, lying on the arms of the leather chair — the swollen knuckles, the white scars, the brown spots, the fingers bent at the joints from fifty years of rope and iron and steering wheels.
I don't look at a man's clothes, he heard somebody say, a long time ago, in a voice he had never actually heard. I look at his hands.
He thought about his own hands. He looked down at them, around the edge of the clipboard. They were smooth and pale and clean, the nails trimmed. There was a little ink on the side of one finger from a pen. They were very good at holding a clipboard, and pointing, and shaking their head at people. He could not remember the last time they had done anything else.
When the meeting broke up and they all came out of the office into the dark showroom, Tyler was not in the doorway anymore. He had gone back out onto the deck by himself, where the wind had died to nothing and the flags hung limp on their poles, and he was on his knees in the dark beside the ESV Platinum, picking his papers up off the planks, one at a time.
There was still a handprint on the hood. A big one, five fingers and a palm, in red dust. He looked at it for a long time. Then he took the microfiber cloth out of his pocket and lifted it toward the print.
And stopped.
And put the cloth back in his pocket, and left it there.
---
Kessling arrived at eight forty-two, in full dark, in a rented white Tahoe with the high beams on.
He was a man of about forty-five in a quarter-zip pullover with a tech company's logo on the chest and a pair of very white sneakers, and he came across the lot talking on a phone held flat in front of his face on speaker, and he did not stop talking on it when Tyler came down the deck steps to meet him. Tyler stood at the bottom of the steps with his hand half out for almost a full minute while Kessling finished telling somebody named Jordan that the Q3 numbers were "frankly embarrassing" and that he "did not want to see that deck again until it didn't make him want to throw up." Then he hung up, looked at Tyler's hand, shook it briefly with two fingers, and said, "Where's the car? I've got maybe twenty minutes."
CHAPTER 20
Tyler showed him the car.
He had moved it, while he waited. He had driven the ESV Platinum down off the deck and parked it under the bright lights by the showroom entrance, the way Craig wanted, and Luis had washed it — again — and it was running, with the air conditioning on high, and there was a tall glass bottle of the fancy water in the cupholder. The hood was spotless. Tyler had finally wiped the handprint off at eight-fifteen, after standing over it for a long time with the cloth in his hand. He had told himself it was because Kessling was coming. He was not sure that was true.
Kessling walked around the car once. He opened the driver's door and looked at the interior and said, "The leather's not the color in the brochure." Tyler said it was the same leather, it was the lighting. Kessling said he knew what he was looking at. He sat in the driver's seat and played with the screen for a while and asked why the navigation didn't have his home address already loaded, and Tyler explained that it would once the car was registered to him, and Kessling said, "That seems like something you'd fix." He got out. He asked what the best price was. Tyler told him. Kessling laughed — a short, hard, contemptuous laugh — and said he could get it for eight thousand less in Dallas, and Tyler said he was welcome to look in Dallas, but this car was here and it was ready tonight, and Kessling said, "Don't get smart with me, kid."
And then Luis came out of the showroom with a clipboard to ask Tyler a question about the paperwork, and Kessling looked at Luis — or rather, did not look at him, looked through him, looked at the space where he was standing as if it were empty — and said to Tyler, without lowering his voice, "Can you tell the car-wash guy to give us a minute?"
Tyler felt something go through him like cold water.
He looked at Kessling. He looked at the white sneakers and the tech-company pullover and the phone in the man's hand, the newest model, the one that cost as much as Luis made in a month. He looked at the man's face, which was smooth and tanned and bored and absolutely certain that everything around it had been arranged for its convenience.
Then he looked at Luis, standing there with the clipboard, his face perfectly polite and perfectly blank, waiting to be dismissed. Tyler had seen that face before. He had seen it on the deck at a quarter to seven, on an old man in a feed-store cap, just before the old man lowered his chin.
"He's not the car-wash guy," Tyler heard himself say. "He's a salesman. As of next month. And he's got a question for me, so if you'll excuse us, you can give us a minute."
Kessling stared at him.
Then he laughed again, differently, and shook his head, and said, "Wow. Okay. Okay. I'll take my business to Dallas," and walked back to the white Tahoe, and got in, and drove away with the high beams on, and did not look back.
Tyler stood under the lights by the showroom door and watched the Tahoe's taillights go down the frontage road and turn onto Route 62 and disappear. One unit. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Gone. And he had sent it away himself.
He waited to feel sick about it. He did not.
"Mr. Brooks," Luis said quietly beside him. "You didn't have to do that."
"Yeah," Tyler said. "I did." He looked at Luis. "What was the question?"
Luis looked down at the clipboard and seemed to have forgotten. Then he said, "Mr. Harmon wants to know if you want to help find the cars. For Mr. Whitcomb. He says it's going to take a lot of phone calls. He says he'll understand if you don't."
Tyler was quiet for a long time.
"Tell him yes," he said.
* * *
He did not sleep that night.
He lay on his back in the dark in the apartment off Main Street with Kayla breathing slowly beside him, and he watched the ceiling fan go around, and he thought about his father.
Tyler's father had sold cars too. Not Cadillacs. Fords and Chevys and whatever came in on trade, at a lot in Lawton, for twenty-six years. He had been good at it. He had been, by his own account, the best reader of customers in southwest Oklahoma. He used to take Tyler to the lot on Saturdays when Tyler was nine and ten and eleven, and sit him on a folding chair by the sales trailer with a soda, and teach him.
CHAPTER 21