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.
" See that guy? " he would say, nodding at a man walking the lot. " Look at his shoes. Look at his watch. Look at how he's walking. Is he walking like he owns the place, or is he walking like he's waiting for somebody to tell him to leave? Look at his truck. Look at his kids. You can tell everything, Ty. Everything you need. You just have to learn to read it. " And Tyler had learned. He had been proud of learning. It had felt like a superpower, at ten — being able to look at a stranger and know how much money they had. Later it had felt like a skill. Later still, like a tool. And somewhere along the way, without his ever noticing, it had stopped feeling like anything at all. It had just become the way he saw people. Shoes, watch, keys, truck, walk. A number. A price. His father had been laid off in 2009, when the lot closed. He had never sold another car. He had driven a delivery van for a medical supply company until his back gave out, and he lived now in a duplex in Lawton with a recliner and a television, and when Tyler went to see him at Christmas, his father would ask him about the numbers. How many units. What's the board look like. You top of the board yet. He never asked anything else. Tyler lay in the dark and thought about the old man's hands lying on the arms of the leather chair in Dale Harmon's office. I look at his hands. He had read the old man perfectly. That was the thing that kept him awake. He had not misread anything. The boots were work boots. The vest was old and mended. The truck was a wreck. Every single thing he had seen was true. He had looked at all of it, and added it up, and come out with exactly the wrong answer, because he had been reading the wrong page. He had read everything about the old man except the old man. At four in the morning, he got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with his laptop, and typed Amos Whitcomb into the search bar, and read until the sun came up.