CHAPTER 27
He knelt down beside the wheelchair and showed her. He showed her how to plug it in, and how to tune the radio, and which button was play. Ida Pruitt watched him with her enormous eyes behind her enormous glasses. When he was done, she took the cassette out of his hand and turned it over and read the song list on the back, her lips moving.
"Patsy," she said. "Well, now. Who are you?"
"Tyler, ma'am. I'm from the dealership."
"You the one found this?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"How long did it take you?"
He thought about it. "About four hours. Maybe five."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she reached out one small, knotted hand and patted his cheek, twice, the way you pat a child.
"That's a long time to spend on an old woman's tape deck," she said.
"It was worth it."
"Hm," said Ida Pruitt, and looked at Amos, and something passed between the two old people that Tyler did not understand. Then she said, "Well, what are you all standing around for? Somebody push me to that car. I want to see it."
They pushed her to the car. It was the first one in the line — the ESV Platinum, Kessling's car, the one with the six-figure sticker that had sat on the end of the deck at Ridgeline with a red-dust handprint on its hood. Amos had asked for it specifically. "The old girl gets the best one," he had told Dale. "She drove a double route in a blizzard."
It was parked, of course, in the handicapped space directly in front of the doors of what had once been the First National Bank of Enid.
Ida's nephew hung her blue placard from the rearview mirror. Then three people — Tyler and Luis and the nephew — lifted the tiny old woman out of her wheelchair, very carefully, between them, and settled her into the passenger seat. Somebody started the engine. Somebody plugged in the tape deck. And on the sidewalk in front of the old bank, with forty or fifty people standing around in the sun and twenty black Cadillacs lining the streets, there came out of the open door of the Escalade, scratchy and tinny and absolutely unmistakable, the sound of Patsy Cline.
Ida Pruitt sat in the leather seat with her purse in her lap and her eyes closed and listened.
Then she opened them, and looked out through the windshield at the faded FOR LEASE banner hanging over the carved stone letters on the front of the bank, and said, in a loud, clear, carrying voice, so that the whole sidewalk heard:
"I hope that old son of a gun is watching."
The sidewalk roared.
---
Tyler did not hit his number in April.
He missed it by two units, which was exactly as many as he had needed on the last Friday of the month when the old Ford pulled onto the lot, and he missed the quarterly bonus with it, and the deposit on the house on Larkspur Drive went away. Kayla was quiet about it for a few days. Then one night at the kitchen table, over takeout, she asked him what had happened that Friday — the real version, not the one he had been telling at work — and he told her. All of it. The flags and the handprint and the papers blowing away across the lot, and the office, and the fence, and the gloves. It took a long time. When he was finished she sat looking at him across the cartons of cold lo mein for a while, and then she said, "You know you've been different since then."
"Different how?"
"You talk to me," she said. "At dinner. You ask me about my day. You haven't done that in about two years."
He did not know what to say to that. So he asked her about her day.
* * *
He did not become a better salesman. Not in the way Craig measured it, anyway. His numbers dropped through the summer. He was slower now. He spent longer on the lot with people. He gave away a great deal of bottled water, the cheap kind, out of the cooler. He spent twenty-five minutes in June explaining the infotainment system in a CT5 to a retired schoolteacher who had come in to get her late husband's car serviced and had no intention of ever buying anything, and he spent forty minutes in July on the deck with a young couple with a baby in a Walmart stroller, looking at a 2019 XT5 with ninety thousand miles on it that they could not quite afford. He found them a way to afford it. It took three calls to the credit union and a trade-in he had to argue Craig up on by twelve hundred dollars. When they drove away in it, the woman reached out of the passenger window and shook his hand and would not let go of it for a long moment.
CHAPTER 28
Brent and Josh thought he had lost his mind. They said so, in the shade by the showroom door, often. Tyler did not mind. He found that he did not hear them as well as he used to.
Craig Pruett said nothing at all about it, which was more unsettling than if he had shouted. But in August, at the monthly sales meeting, when Dale Harmon stood up at the front of the room and announced that the dealership's customer satisfaction scores for the summer had been the highest in the region, and that a disproportionate number of the comments had mentioned two salesmen by name, Craig had looked across the table at Tyler for a long moment, and then looked away, and smoothed his tie down flat against his stomach with both hands.
The two salesmen were Tyler Brooks and Luis Ortega.
* * *
Luis had been put at a desk by the window on the showroom floor. Not next to Brent. Dale had said Amos told him to put him somewhere better, and Dale had taken it literally; the desk by the window was the one with the best view of the lot and the deck, and for eleven years it had belonged to the top salesman in the building, who had retired in March. Luis had sat down at it on his first morning and not known what to do with his hands.
His commission on the twenty Escalades — paid by Dale at a flat rate per unit, because there was no margin to take a percentage of — came to ten thousand dollars. It was the most money Luis had ever had at one time in his life. He gave four thousand of it to his mother, who used it to fix the roof on her house in Altus. He put four thousand in a savings account. And with the rest, after a long time thinking about it, he bought a used F-150 with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and a dent in the tailgate, and drove it to a small farmhouse on a ridge above the Cimarron, and spent a Saturday helping an old man put a new roof on a barn.
He went back the next Saturday, too. And the one after that.
"You keep coming out here," Amos told him in September, "people are going to start thinking you like me."
"I do like you, sir."
"Well, quit it. It's bad for my reputation."
Luis grinned and went back up the ladder.
* * *
Tyler called his father in October.
He did it on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on the steps of the apartment building with a cup of coffee, in the long low autumn light. They talked about the weather, which was dry, and the Sooners, who were losing, and his father's back, which was bad. And then there was the pause where his father always asked about the numbers. Tyler waited for it. He could feel it coming down the line like a truck on a highway.
"So," his father said. "How's the board?"
"It's all right," Tyler said. "I'm not top of it."
"No?"
"No. I'm about the middle."
There was a silence on the line. Tyler could picture his father in the recliner in the duplex in Lawton, the television on mute, frowning.
"Dad," Tyler said, "do you remember when you used to take me to the lot? On Saturdays? And sit me in the chair by the trailer?"
"Sure."
"And teach me how to read people? Their shoes and their trucks and all that?"
"Sure I remember. You were good at it. You were a natural, Ty. Best I ever saw at that age."
"Yeah," Tyler said. "I was." He turned the coffee cup slowly in his hands. "Dad, can I ask you something? Do you remember any of them? The customers. Not what they bought. Them. Do you remember any of their names?"
The silence on the line went on for a long time. Long enough that Tyler thought the call had dropped.
"There was a man," his father said finally. Slowly. As if he were bringing something up from a long way down. "Old Black fella. Farmer, from out past Snyder. He used to come in every spring, look at trucks, never buy anything. Every spring for — oh, six, seven years. I used to send him off to the new guy, whoever was newest, so I didn't have to waste time on him." Another pause. "And one year, the new guy was a kid named Danny something. Danny Reyes. And Danny spent the whole afternoon with that old man. Walked every truck on the lot with him. And at the end of the day the old man bought two. Brand new. Cash. And then he came back every spring after that and bought from Danny, every year, for ten years. And I never — I never knew his name." His voice had changed. "I sold cars for twenty-six years, Ty. I don't think I remember one of their names."