Amos stood behind the card table. Nora stood beside him with the typed list. And one at a time, she read the names.
"Dewey Lambert."
Dewey came forward on his cane and laid the Phillips 66 receipt on the table. Amos picked up June's pen. He uncapped it. And under the faded pencil, in blue-black ink, in the same square forward-leaning hand that had written the IOU thirty-eight years earlier, he wrote: PAID IN FULL. May 2026. — A. W. Then he blew on the ink, gently, until it was dry, and handed the receipt back to Dewey, and picked up a set of keys from the table and handed him those too.
"Third car," Nora said. "Right there in front of the hardware store."
Dewey looked at the receipt in one hand and the keys in the other. Then he looked down the street at the third black Escalade, where Marcus the detailer was standing beside the driver's door, holding it open. He started to walk toward it. Halfway there, he stopped, and turned around, and came back, and shook Amos's hand again, and did not say anything at all, because he could not.
"Wanda Mercer."
A small white-haired woman in a lavender pantsuit came forward on the arm of a middle-aged man. She was holding a framed piece of paper — a page torn out of a trucker's logbook, mounted under glass in a gold frame. "Clyde hung it in the den," she said. "Right next to the deer head. Twenty-eight years. I used to dust it every Saturday." She held it out to Amos. "I didn't want to take it out of the frame. Do you mind?"
"No, ma'am," Amos said. He wrote PAID IN FULL on the glass itself, with the fountain pen, carefully, over the logbook page, and the ink beaded a little on the glass and then held. "Clyde sold his wedding ring that winter, Wanda. Did you know that?"
"I knew," she said. "He told me in the spring. I hit him with a frying pan." She smiled, and her eyes filled. "Then I went down to the pawn shop and bought it back."
"Cody Doyle."
The young man in the National Guard uniform came forward. He was tall and sunburned, with a buzz cut and big hands, and he stood in front of the card table at a kind of parade rest, very stiff, and his voice when he spoke was very formal.
"Sir. I'm Hank Doyle's grandson. My grandpa passed in '09, sir, when I was eight. I don't have his paper. My grandma said he kept it in his wallet, and he was buried with his wallet. I'm sorry, sir."
Amos looked at him for a long time. "You've got his hands," he said. "Hank had hands like that. Like shovels." He picked up an index card from a small stack beside the keys — Nora had brought blanks — and uncapped June's pen, and wrote on it, slowly: OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb. And then, beneath it: PAID IN FULL. May 2026. — A. W. He held it out to the young man. "Your granddaddy sold his bass boat to keep driving for me. He loved that boat more than he loved most people. He never said one word about it. You put this in your wallet, Cody. And you tell your kids."
Cody Doyle took the card. He looked at it. Then he came to attention, right there on the sidewalk, and saluted the old man, sharply, and held it. Amos did not know what to do. After a moment he took his cap off, and held it against his chest, and stood there bareheaded in the sun until the young man lowered his hand.
"Carol Vance Hendricks."
Rosalie Vance's daughter came forward and laid the cardboard flap from the Remington shotgun-shell box on the table, worn as soft as felt, and Amos wrote on it, and she wept, and he held her.
"Ruben Salazar."
Ruben was seventy-nine, short and broad and quick, with a white mustache and a straw cowboy hat, and he came up to the table talking — "Amos, Amos, you remember Christmas Eve, the ice on the Turner Turnpike, we were jackknifed for six hours, you brought the tamales" — and Amos said, "I remember, Ruben, your wife's tamales, I ate eleven," and Ruben said, "Twelve! You ate twelve!" And then he looked past Amos at the young man in the white shirt and tie standing beside the card table, the one holding the stack of buyer's orders, and said something in Spanish, and Luis answered in Spanish, and Ruben's face broke open into a grin, and he reached across the table and grabbed Luis by both shoulders and shook him, laughing, and said in English, "This is your salesman? This chamaco? Amos, he's a baby!"
"He's the best one they've got," Amos said.
* * *
It went on for nearly two hours.
CHAPTER 26
Twenty names. Twenty sets of keys. Seventeen scraps of paper: receipts and index cards and napkins and logbook pages and the back of a church bulletin and, in one case, a piece of a cardboard box that had once held a case of motor oil. Three new index cards, written fresh in June's ink, for the three that had been lost. Twenty times, PAID IN FULL. Some people cried. Some people laughed. One old man, Lester Pike, who was eighty-seven and had driven for Whitcomb until 2004, did not say anything at all, but stood at the card table for a long time holding his keys and looking at Amos, and then reached out and put his hand flat on the old man's chest, over his heart, the way you put a hand on a horse to calm it, and left it there a moment, and walked away.
Tyler watched all of it from beside the eighteenth car.
He had not expected to be so close to it. He had thought he would stand at the back. But Nora had put him to work early, carrying the card table, then the folding chairs for the oldest of the old drivers, then running back and forth along the line of cars with keys and name cards and once, frantically, with a bottle of water and a folded towel for a woman in a wheelchair who had gotten too hot in the sun. Nobody had told him who he was. Nobody seemed to care. To the people on that sidewalk, he was just one more young man from the dealership in a work shirt, running back and forth, fetching things.
He found that he liked it. He liked it more than he had liked anything in a long time.
The last name on the list was Ida Pruitt.
She was ninety years old. She had been brought down from the care home in Guymon that morning by a nephew in a minivan, three and a half hours across the Panhandle, and she sat now in a wheelchair at the very end of the sidewalk in the shade of the old bank's portico, a tiny, fierce, bird-boned woman with a cloud of white hair and enormous glasses and a pink cardigan buttoned to the neck in spite of the heat. She had a large black patent-leather purse on her lap, and both of her hands were clamped on top of it.
When Nora read her name, she did not wait for anybody to push her. She worked the wheels of the chair herself, with surprising strength, and rolled up to the card table, and looked up at Amos through her enormous glasses.
"Well, Amos."
"Well, Ida."
"I hear you finally sold that company."
"I did."
"Took you long enough to get rid of it, too." She unsnapped the black purse and reached inside, and took out a small plastic sandwich bag, and inside the sandwich bag there was a folded paper napkin with a faded orange-brown Waffle House logo on one corner. She took it out of the bag with great care, and unfolded it, and smoothed it flat on the white tablecloth with her small, knotted, liver-spotted hands. The carpenter's-marker letters had bled into the napkin over the decades until they were blurred and furred at the edges, but you could still read every one.
OWED: One (1) black Cadillac. When we make it. — A. Whitcomb
"Every day," Ida said. "Every day for thirty-eight years. In my purse. I took it to church and to the Piggly Wiggly and to the doctor and to my sister's funeral. They took my purse away from me in the care home once, the first week, said I couldn't have my own purse, some rule. I like to took that nurse's head off. They gave it back." She looked up at him. "I knew you'd make good. Rosalie always said you would. I said I didn't need you to make good. I just wanted to be there when you did."
Amos could not answer her for a moment. He uncapped June's pen. His hand was not altogether steady. He wrote PAID IN FULL on the napkin, very carefully, so the ink would not bleed, and blew on it, and handed it back to her. She folded it up again along the same old creases and put it back in the sandwich bag and back in her purse and snapped the purse shut.
"Now," she said. "Where's my tape deck?"
Amos looked at Nora. Nora looked down the sidewalk.
Tyler was already coming. He had it in a plastic grocery bag. He had found it eleven days earlier, after four hours of searching online, in a pawn shop in Lawton, three blocks from the duplex where his father lived — a 1994 Panasonic portable cassette player, silver and black, with a cord that plugged into the Escalade's power outlet and a little FM transmitter that would play it through the car's speakers. He had tested it himself on his kitchen table. He had also, at the same pawn shop, for two dollars, found a cassette of Patsy Cline's greatest hits in a cracked plastic case, and he had brought that too.