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.
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