The glass doors of the showroom opened and the old man came out alone into the bright wet afternoon. He walked slowly across the lot. He did not seem surprised to see Derek standing beside his car. He did not seem anything. He came up the row of parked cars at his unhurried old man's pace, in his khaki jacket and his plaid shirt and his pleated trousers and his suede loafers, which were darker now at the toes where they had gotten wet, and his tan beret at its slight angle, and stopped about six feet away, and looked at Derek.
"Mr. Lawson," he said.
"Mr. Booker."
They stood there. A car went by on the street, its tires hissing on the wet pavement.
Derek had rehearsed what he was going to say. He had rehearsed it for twenty minutes, standing there by the gray sedan. He had built it carefully, the way he built a pitch, with an opening and a middle and a close. It was a good apology. It acknowledged what he had done without making excuses. It explained the pressure he had been under without asking for sympathy. It was, he thought, the best apology he had ever written. And now, standing in front of the old man in the long gold light, he opened his mouth to deliver it, and found that he could not remember a single word.
"I'm sorry," he said instead.
It came out rough and low, not like his voice at all.
"I'm sorry. I don't. I had a whole thing I was going to say, and I can't. I'm just sorry." He looked at the ground, at the puddle between them, shining in the sun. "I didn't ask you anything. I didn't even ask your name. I looked at you and I decided, and I didn't ask. I've been doing that for twelve years and I've been good at it, I've been really good at it, and I thought that meant I was right. And I wasn't. I haven't been right in months. I've been getting it wrong and wrong and wrong and I didn't know why, and I think. I think I know now." He made himself look up. "I'm sorry I pointed at you. I'm sorry I told you to leave. I'm sorry I said you couldn't afford anything. You didn't deserve it. Nobody does." He stopped. "That's all. That's all I've got."
Calvin Booker looked at him for a long time.
Then he nodded. Slowly. Once. The same small, firm, unhurried nod he had given in the showroom when he said twenty.
"Thank you," he said. "I accept."
Derek stared at him. "That's it?"
"What else did you want?" Calvin asked, mildly. "You want me to yell at you? My granddaughter's better at that than I am. You want me to tell you it's all right? It's not all right. You know it's not. You want me to tell you you're a bad man?" He shook his head slowly. "I don't think you're a bad man, Mr. Lawson. I think you're a frightened one. They look a lot alike from the outside. But they're not the same."
Derek did not answer. He did not trust his voice.
"Mr. Halloran told you I asked him not to fire you," said Calvin.
"Yes, sir."
"And you want to know why."
"Yes, sir."
Calvin looked away, out across the lot, toward the street, where the sunlight was lying across the wet roofs of the buildings opposite. There was an old brick building on the corner, two blocks down, with a faded hand-painted sign above its door that had once said something and now said nothing. Derek had driven past it every day for twelve years. He had never looked at it.
"That used to be Miss Pearl's," said Calvin Booker. "The beauty parlor. My wife got her hair done there every other Saturday for twenty years. Loretta. She passed four years ago." He was quiet for a moment. "I used to park right across the street from here and wait for her. Read the paper. Listen to the radio. Watch your showroom. Watched it go up, fifteen years ago, all that glass and steel. Watched the people go in and out. Watched how your people treated them." He glanced at Derek. "I watched you, too. Not every Saturday. But I saw you. Ten, twelve years ago, when you were new. Skinny young fellow with a cheap suit. You used to go out on the lot to every single person who pulled in. Every one. Didn't matter what they drove. Old ladies in station wagons. Kids in beaters. Families with a car seat in the back. You'd walk right out to them in the rain with your hand out and a big grin on your face. Loretta noticed you before I did. She used to say, look, Calvin, there's that boy again. He's going to be good at this."
Derek felt something close up in his throat.
"I don't remember that," he said.