"I know you don't," said Calvin. "That's what I'm telling you." He turned back to face him. "Somewhere between then and now, somebody taught you that you can tell what a person is worth by looking at their shoes. And you believed them. And it worked for a while. It always does, for a while. And then it stops working, and you don't know why, and you get scared, and you hold on to it harder. That's what I saw this morning. I saw a man holding on very hard to something that's been cutting his hands for a long time."
He paused.
"Fifty years ago," he said, "I walked into a Cadillac dealership on Michigan Avenue with four hundred and twelve dollars in my pocket that I'd saved for two years. I was wearing my chauffeur's uniform because it was the best thing I owned. And a man in a good suit, a man a lot like you, came over and told me the service entrance was around the back. If I was there to pick somebody up." He smiled faintly. "So I left. And I took the bus to Gary, Indiana, and bought a used Cadillac from a widow named Mrs. Opal Turnbull in her kitchen. Black. Four hundred and twelve dollars. She gave me a piece of pound cake and wrote me a receipt on a sheet of notebook paper. She didn't have to sell it to me. She had three other men come to look at it that week. White men. With better jobs and better clothes. She told me afterward. She sold it to me because I was the only one who asked her about her husband. Harold. Whose car it was. I asked her what kind of man he was. And she told me. For an hour. And at the end of it she said, I'd like Harold's car to go to you, young man."
He reached into the inside pocket of the khaki jacket and took out a battered brown leather wallet, worn soft and shiny with age, and opened it, and took out a folded square of paper so old and so soft it was almost cloth. He unfolded it carefully and held it out. Derek took it.
It was a photocopy. Old, faded, the toner gone gray. A sheet of lined notebook paper with handwriting on it in pencil, shaky and old-fashioned. Received from Mr. C. Booker, four hundred twelve dollars, for one Cadillac automobile, black. Paid in full. Then a signature, and a date, and underneath, in smaller writing: God bless you, young man. Drive careful.
"The original's on my office wall," said Calvin. "I've carried that copy for forty years. Every car I've ever bought since, I've paid in full. Every single one. Because that's how she did it with me. And every car I've ever bought has been black. Because that's what she sold me." He looked at Derek. "She gave me a chance she didn't have to give me, Mr. Lawson. That's all. She didn't know if I'd turn out to be anything. I could've been a fool. I could've wrecked Harold's car in a week. She gave it to me anyway. And I've spent fifty years trying to pay it forward. Not always successfully. But trying." He held out his hand for the paper. "That's why I asked Mr. Halloran not to fire you. Not because you deserve it. You don't, particularly. But because somebody gave me a chance once when I didn't deserve it either. And I've found it's usually worth it."
Derek handed the paper back. His hand was shaking. The old man folded it, carefully, along its soft old creases, and put it back in his wallet, and put the wallet back in his pocket.
"I don't know what to say," Derek said.
"Then don't say anything. Do something." Calvin took his keys out of his jacket pocket. An old car key on a plain ring, with a small brass tag on it shaped like the letter B. "Those twenty cars are going to be delivered to my garage on Western Avenue on the eighteenth of next month. Eli's handling the paperwork. But somebody's going to have to make sure every one of them is perfect before it leaves this lot. Every one. Checked. Detailed. Every option working. Every scratch found and fixed. I don't take delivery of anything less than perfect. I never have." He looked at Derek. "I'd like that somebody to be you."
Derek stared at him.
"And on the eighteenth," said Calvin, "I'd like you to drive the first one over to my garage yourself. And get out. And meet the men and women who are going to drive it. I've got a hundred and forty people working for me, Mr. Lawson. Some of them are veterans. Some of them did time and couldn't get a job anywhere else. Some of them are grandmothers who started driving for me after their husbands died and they needed something to do