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."
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.
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.