CHAPTER 29
Tyler did not say anything.
"Why'd you ask me that?" his father said.
"I'll tell you," Tyler said. "I'll come down next weekend and tell you. It's kind of a long story."
* * *
The wind came across the high plains on the last Friday of October the way it always came in that part of Oklahoma, from the southwest, steady and dry and full of red dust, and by four o'clock in the afternoon it had turned every flag on the lot of Ridgeline Cadillac into a cracking, snapping, living thing.
Tyler was on the deck. He had a clipboard under his arm and a key fob in his hand, and he was wiping a fine haze of red dust off the hood of a black Escalade, and he was not thinking about anything in particular, when he heard the sound of an engine he did not recognize.
It was a small car. An old one. A Buick, maybe fifteen years old, maroon, with a cracked taillight and a bumper sticker on the back that said MY GRANDCHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT WHEELER ELEMENTARY. It came across the lot slowly and parked crookedly across two spaces near the bottom of the deck steps, and a woman got out.
She was in her seventies, probably. Small and stout, with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in a pair of men's work jeans and a barn coat with straw stuck to the sleeves and a smear of what was almost certainly cow manure across one knee. She had on rubber boots. She stood beside the Buick in the wind and looked up at the long black row of Escalades on the deck, shading her eyes against the sun, the way you look at something you have heard about for a long time and never seen.
Tyler felt it happen.
He felt his mind start to do the thing. Automatically. Instantly. Rubber boots. Barn coat. Buick. Bumper sticker. No phone. No keys. Walking slow. Stopping to look, like a tourist. The quick, practiced, invisible arithmetic, running all on its own, the way reading happens, the way breathing happens. He felt the number start to come up, the way it always came up.
And he put it down.
It was not easy. It was like putting down something heavy that he had been carrying for so long he had forgotten his arms were tired. But he did it. He stood on the deck in the wind and he put it down, and he left it there, on the dark planks, and he walked away from it toward the top of the steps.
The woman had started up. She had one hand on the rail. She was breathing a little hard.
"Afternoon," Tyler said.
She looked up at him, startled, as if she had expected something else. Then she said, "Afternoon."
"Windy one."
"Always is."
"Can I get you some water? It's hot out here."
The woman looked at him for a moment longer, and he saw it — he saw her waiting for the flicker behind his eyes. The decision. The look. He knew it now. He had learned to recognize it from the other side. She had probably been watching for it her whole life.
He made sure she did not find it.
"I'm Tyler," he said, and put out his hand.
She looked at the hand. Then she wiped her own palm on the leg of her work jeans and took it. Her grip was hard and dry, and her hand was rough, the knuckles swollen, a small white scar across the back of it.
"Maxine," she said. "Maxine Tuttle."
"Nice to meet you, Maxine. What brings you out?"
"Oh," she said, and laughed, a little embarrassed, and looked past him at the cars. "I don't know. My husband always wanted one of these. Forty years he talked about it. Said when we retired he was going to buy one and drive it to Branson. He passed in August." She looked down at her rubber boots. "I was just driving by, and I saw 'em up here, all lined up in the sun, and I thought, well, I'll just go look at 'em. For him. I don't guess I'm going to buy one."
"That's all right," Tyler said. "You don't have to buy one to look at one."
He went and got her a bottle of water — the cheap kind, out of the cooler by the wash bay — and when he came back, she was standing beside the first Escalade in the row with her hand flat on the hood, the way you put a hand on the neck of a horse.
CHAPTER 30
He did not hurry her. He stood beside her and let her look. After a while he opened the driver's door and she got in, and sat behind the wheel, and put both hands on it, and did not say anything for a long time, and he did not say anything either. The wind blew across the deck. The flags cracked. The big flag at the corner of the lot went whump, whump, whump against the sky.
Later — much later, after she had told him about her husband, whose name was Earl, and the dairy they had run together for thirty-eight years outside Hobart, and the trip to Branson they had never taken, and her grandson the honor student, and her bad hip; after he had walked her through every button on the dashboard and shown her how the seats warmed up and let her play Earl's favorite song on the sound system, which was Merle Haggard; after she had cried a little, and laughed a little, and drunk the whole bottle of water — she got out of the car and stood on the deck in the long gold light of the sinking sun and looked at him.
"You've been out here with me better than an hour," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'm not going to buy a car."
"I know."
"Then why'd you do all that?"
Tyler thought about it. He thought about it honestly, the way an old man in a feed-store cap had once taught him to think about things. And he found that he had an answer.
"Because you asked me to," he said. "When you came up the steps. You didn't say it. But you did."
Maxine Tuttle looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached out and patted him on the cheek, twice, the way you pat a child.
She went down the steps slowly, one hand on the rail, and got into the old maroon Buick, and drove away across the lot into the red-gold light, and Tyler stood at the top of the steps and watched her go, and lifted his hand.
Behind him, on the deck, the long row of black Escalades caught the last of the sun and burned along their whole length like a line of fire.
He never did find out whether she came back. It did not matter. He had not done it to find out.
* * *
Amos Whitcomb died two years later, in the spring, in his sleep, in the big bed in the house on the ridge above the Cimarron, at the age of seventy-eight. Nora found him in the morning. There was a cup of cold coffee on the nightstand and the window was open, and the wind was moving the curtains.
The funeral was at the Methodist church in Enid. It was standing room only. Twenty black Escalades were parked along Grand Avenue outside, and a twenty-first car — a dusty tan-and-brown 1996 Ford F-250, with a bungee cord on the tailgate and a fly swatter in the gun rack — was parked at the head of the line, in the handicapped space in front of the old bank, with a blue placard hanging from its mirror that had been borrowed, for the day, from a ninety-two-year-old woman in a pink cardigan who sat in the front pew with a black patent-leather purse on her lap and refused to take it off.
There were six pallbearers. Dale Harmon was one. Cody Doyle, in his dress uniform, was another. Ruben Salazar, and Dewey Lambert's son, because Dewey's legs would no longer carry him. Luis Ortega, in a black suit he had bought for the occasion.
And Tyler Brooks.
He had not expected to be asked. Nora had called him three days after her grandfather died and said, "He left a list. You're on it." And then, after a moment: "He left a note with the list. It says, Make sure the salesman wears the gloves."
So Tyler wore them. A pair of old leather work gloves, cracked and darkened with use, too big for his hands. He wore them up the aisle of the church and out the doors and down the steps into the bright wind, with his shoulder under the corner of the casket and five other men's shoulders under the rest, and he did not take them off until it was over.
After the burial, standing at the edge of the cemetery on the hill, while the crowd drifted back toward their cars, Nora came and found him. She had something in her hand. She held it out.
It was a small square of paper, torn from the bottom of a page of lined notepaper, the kind you would find on a pad by a telephone. It had been folded once. On it, in a square, blunt, forward-leaning hand, written in blue-black ink with what was almost certainly an old fountain pen, there was a single line.
Tyler — You can spare four minutes. — A. W.
And under that, in the same hand, in the same ink, two more.
Paid in full.