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.
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