Calvin looked up at him and did not get up.
At the back of the showroom, beside the coffee station, three young men in dark suits had stopped what they were doing. Tanner Voss had come out of his office with the middle-aged woman's paperwork in his hand and stopped dead in the doorway. Josh Kim had come out of the finance office and stopped beside him. And Eli Brooks had come from the brochure rack, without quite deciding to, and was standing a little in front of them both, with his hands clasped in front of him so tightly that his knuckles had gone pale.
They had all seen Derek's face as he crossed the floor. They had all seen it before. And they all knew, the way you know a storm is coming when the light goes strange and the birds go quiet, that something was about to happen.
* * *
What had been said in Rick Halloran's office was this.
Rick had been sitting behind his big desk with his reading glasses on his nose and a printout in front of him, and he had not asked Derek to sit down. He had looked at Derek over the top of the glasses for a long moment and then said, mildly, the way he said everything: Derek, I just got off the phone with Anthony Pellegrino.
Derek's stomach had turned to ice.
He's not coming in, Rick had said. He's going to Bauer's. Seems his wife has a cousin there who can get them the family discount. He wanted me to tell you he's real sorry, he likes you, he'll keep you in mind for next time. And then Rick had taken off his reading glasses and folded them and set them on the printout, and looked at Derek with an expression of genuine sympathy that was much worse than anger would have been, and said, I'm sorry, buddy. I know you were counting on that one. But I've got to be straight with you. The thirtieth is the thirtieth. I've got a regional manager breathing down my neck. I can't carry you another month. Not on a twosome that never teed off.
Derek had said something. He did not remember what. Something about having other leads, something about the end of the month always picking up. Rick had nodded and said, sure, sure, I hope so, and put his glasses back on, and looked down at the printout, and Derek had understood that the conversation was over, and had walked out of the office.
And there, at his desk, in the chair where Anthony Pellegrino was supposed to have sat, was the old man.
Derek did not think. Afterward, when he tried to understand what had happened, that was the thing he would come back to over and over. He did not think. He had been thinking for three months, thinking and calculating and worrying and lying awake at three in the morning doing math on the back of envelopes, and now, all at once, he simply stopped. Something in him that had been wound tighter and tighter, day after day, since the divorce, since the custody hearing, since the first month under target, came loose all at once. And what came out was not a thought. It was a reflex. The oldest reflex he had. Read the lot. Cut your losses. Do not waste one more minute on somebody who is not going to buy.
He stood at the corner of his desk and looked down at the old man in the leather chair.
Up close, the old man was even less like a customer than he had looked from across the room. The beret, which up close was a soft wool felt, sand-colored, a little faded. The short gray beard, neat, but grizzled. The deep lines in the dark skin of his face and around his eyes. The khaki jacket, zipped halfway, clean but old, the cuffs a little frayed. The plaid shirt underneath, brown and gray and white, soft and faded from washing. The baggy gray-beige trousers with their old-fashioned pleats. The brown suede loafers, worn soft and shapeless, and the thin dark bare ankles above them. Derek had seen a thousand old men like him. They came in on slow weekday mornings to sit in the leather chairs and drink the free coffee and look at the cars they could never afford, and talk about the cars they used to have, and take up an hour of somebody's time, and then go home. They were lonely, most of them. Derek understood that. He was not a monster. He felt sorry for them. He had given them his time, in the early years, when he had time to give.