"Sit down, son," said Calvin. "You've got a lot of typing to do."
Eli sat down.
Josh Kim came over and quietly pulled up a chair beside him, without being asked, and quietly helped him find the fleet order forms on the computer, which none of them had ever used. Tanner Voss came over a few minutes later, with the middle-aged woman's lease paperwork finally gathered up off the floor and handed off to the business office, and stood behind Eli's chair with his arms folded and his mouth still slightly open and said, at intervals, holy crap, until Josh told him to go and get Mr. Booker some more coffee. And Calvin Booker sat in the leather armchair and talked Eli through it, step by step, line by line. What to ask for. What not to accept. What the factory would try to charge for delivery and why it should not. What a fleet discount looked like, and what a fleet discount looked like when the buyer was paying cash on the day and the dealership was going to make its whole quarter on one sale. He did not raise his voice. He did not hurry. He made jokes. He told stories about Reggie Brooks. He asked Eli about his family, his mother, his college, why he had gone into selling cars, and Eli, who had never in his life been asked so many questions by someone who seemed so genuinely interested in the answers, found himself telling the old man things he had not told anybody. That he had a degree in economics and could not find a job that used it. That his mother cleaned rooms at a hotel downtown and had been on her feet for twenty-two years and her knees were going. That he had taken this job because the commission structure meant that if he was ever good at it, really good, he could make enough in one year to pay for her knee surgery. That after five weeks he had begun to think he would never be good at it at all.
Calvin listened to all of it. And when Eli finished, he was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "What's the commission on a deal like this, Eli? Have you worked it out?"
Eli had not. He had not dared. He looked at the numbers on the screen in front of him, and did some arithmetic in his head, and then did it again, and then went very still.
"I think," he said, in a very small voice, "I think it might be more than my mother has made in the last five years."
"Then I guess her knees are going to be all right," said Calvin Booker.
And Eli Brooks took off his round wire-rimmed glasses, and put his face in his hands, at his desk at the far end of the showroom, beside the black sports car that nobody was ever going to buy, and did not move for a long time. And Josh Kim put a hand on his shoulder. And Tanner Voss, standing behind them with a fresh cup of coffee for Mr. Booker, said, very quietly, holy crap, man. And the old man in the beret picked up his coffee and drank it, and looked away out of the big plate-glass windows at the parking lot, to give the young man a moment.
Derek Lawson was not there to see it.
He had gone outside.
* * *
He sat in his car in the employee lot behind the dealership for two hours and eleven minutes.
It was a black sedan, two years old, a Cadillac, of course, because a man who sells Cadillacs cannot drive anything else. It had a monthly payment of eight hundred and forty dollars that he could not afford and a leather interior that smelled of the vanilla air freshener his daughter had picked out the last time she visited, and he sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the windows closed and his hands on the steering wheel, and looked through the windshield at the back wall of the dealership's service bay, which was painted beige and had a hose coiled on a hook and a sign that said EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.
He did not cry. He was not a man who cried. He had not cried at his father's funeral or at the custody hearing or on the night his wife told him she was leaving. He sat very still and stared at the sign and listened to the rain, which had started again, tapping softly on the roof of the car, and he went over it. Again and again. From the moment he walked out of Rick Halloran's office to the moment the old man said all black, and I'm paying in full. Every second. Every word. His own hand coming up, waving. His own voice. Let's be honest. You can't afford anything in here. His own finger, pointing, shaking, in front of the old man's face. Then stop wasting my time.