And every car Booker Executive Transportation had ever owned had been black.
His wife used to tease him about it. Loretta had wanted, just once, for him to buy a car in some other color. Navy blue, she said. Burgundy. That nice dark green. Something with a little life in it, Calvin. And he would say, no, baby. Black. And she would roll her eyes and say, you are the most stubborn man God ever made, and he would say, that's why you married me, and she would say, that is not why I married you, I married you because you were the only man on the South Side who could dance, and he would take her hand right there in the kitchen and prove it.
He never told her why black. He was not sure, himself, that he could have put it into words. It had something to do with the Cadillac in Mrs. Turnbull's garage, and something to do with the showroom on Michigan Avenue, and something to do with the way people looked at a long black car when it pulled up to the curb outside a hotel or a church or a courthouse. They looked at it the way you look at something serious. Something that has come for a reason. Nobody ever laughed at a black car.
Loretta had been gone four years now. Cancer, in the end, after a long time of fighting it with a stubbornness that rivaled his own. He still had not moved her reading glasses from the nightstand on her side of the bed.
On the morning of the day he went to buy the twenty Escalades, Calvin Booker woke at five, as he always did, and lay for a minute in the gray light listening to the house. It was a big old brick house on a tree-lined street on the South Side, not far from where he had grown up, and it was too big for one man, everyone told him so. His daughter told him so. His granddaughter told him so. His doctor told him so, in the course of telling him that a man of seventy-three with a heart that had already had one stent put in it should probably not be climbing three flights of stairs every night to a bedroom at the top of the house. Calvin told all of them the same thing, which was that he had bought the house in nineteen eighty-eight with cash, for Loretta, because she had always wanted a house with a turret, and he was going to die in it, and in the meantime the stairs were good for his heart.
He got up. He shaved, carefully, around the short gray beard that he had worn since nineteen seventy-nine, when Loretta told him it made him look distinguished. He trimmed it with the little scissors in the medicine cabinet until it lay close and neat along his jaw. He looked at himself in the mirror. A thin old Black man with dark brown skin creased by seventy-three years of weather and laughter and worry, with close-cropped silver hair curling tight against his scalp, and deep lines around his eyes, and a slight stoop to his shoulders that had come on in the last few years and that no amount of standing up straight seemed to fix. His eyes were dark and steady. They had always been steady. Loretta used to say that he had the calmest eyes she had ever seen on a man. She said it was the first thing she noticed about him. She said that in a room full of men shouting, Calvin Booker would be the one sitting quietly in the corner, watching, and that was how you knew he was the one who was going to win.
He dressed slowly. He did not own many clothes, and the ones he owned he had owned for a long time, because he did not see the point in buying something new when the old thing still worked. A plaid button-down shirt in brown and gray and white, soft from a thousand washings, that his granddaughter Nia had given him for Christmas six years ago. A pair of loose, pleated gray-beige trousers that had been in fashion, he was told, at some point in the previous century. A pair of brown suede loafers, the color of a fawn, soft and broken in and shaped exactly to his feet, which he wore without socks from April to October because he had worn them that way since the nineteen-seventies and did not intend to stop now. Over it all, a light khaki jacket in a pale grayish brown, with a zipper that came up halfway, which he left unzipped. And last, as he did every day when he