with their hands. Some of them are kids just out of school. Some of them are old men in berets." He smiled. "Not one of them looks like what they're worth. I'd like you to meet them. I'd like you to shake their hands. And then I'd like you to come back here and do your job the way you used to do it, when you were a skinny young fellow in a cheap suit who went out in the rain to everybody." He unlocked the car. "That's all I want. You can say no."
Derek Lawson stood beside the gray sedan with the dent in its bumper, in the long gold light of the afternoon, with the puddles blazing around his polished black shoes, and looked at the old man for a long time.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, sir. I'll do it."
"Good," said Calvin Booker.
He opened the door of the gray sedan and eased himself down into the driver's seat, slowly, one hand on the frame of the door, the way an old man does. He set his beret straight on his silver hair. He put the key in the ignition. Then he looked up through the open door at Derek, standing beside the car.
"One more thing," he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Next time somebody sits down at your desk," said Calvin Booker, "ask them their name."
He closed the door and started the engine, and the radio came on inside the car, faintly, an old soul song, the Delfonics, and the gray sedan backed slowly out of its space and turned and rolled away across the wet shining lot toward the street, and stopped at the exit, its turn signal blinking for a long time, the way old men drive, and then turned right, toward Kedzie, toward the old brick building on the corner with the faded sign that had once been Miss Pearl's, and was gone.
* * *
That evening, in a small second-floor apartment above a laundromat on the far South Side, Eli Brooks sat at his mother's kitchen table with a printout of a fleet sales contract in front of him and tried to explain to her what had happened.
He was not doing a very good job of it. He had started three times and stopped three times. His mother, whose name was Denise, and who had come home at six-forty from a ten-hour shift cleaning rooms on the fourteenth through nineteenth floors of a hotel on Wacker Drive, sat across from him in her housekeeping uniform with her shoes off and her feet up on the other chair and a bag of frozen peas on her left knee, and listened, and watched his face, and waited.
"So an old man came in," she said finally, helpfully. "And sat at the other boy's desk. And the other boy was rude to him."
"Really rude, Mama. He pointed at him. Right in his face. He told him he couldn't afford anything."
Denise's eyebrows went up. "And the old man?"
"He just sat there. He didn't even get mad. He just smiled. And then he said he came to buy twenty Escalades." Eli laughed, a little wildly. He still could not quite believe it. "Twenty. All black. Paying in full. You should have seen their faces. You should have seen Derek's face. I thought he was going to pass out."
"Twenty," said his mother slowly.
"Twenty."
"And he bought them from you."
"He bought them from me." Eli pushed the contract across the table toward her. "Because I brought him a coffee. That's what he said. Because I brought him a coffee in a real cup and asked if somebody was helping him. Mama, it was Mr. Booker. Calvin Booker. Uncle Reggie's boss. The car service. He remembered Uncle Reggie. He remembered him singing Al Green on the way to the airport."
His mother went very still.
She looked down at the contract. She did not pick it up. She looked at the numbers on it for a long time, at the line near the bottom that said COMMISSION and the figure beside it, and Eli watched her lips move very slightly as she read the figure, once, and then again, and then she put one hand flat on the table beside the paper, as if to steady herself, and looked up at him.
"Eli," she said. "That's. Baby, that's. Is that right? Is that a real number?"
"It's real. Mr. Halloran checked it three times. It goes out on the next pay cycle." He swallowed. "It's your knee, Mama. It's both your knees. It's the surgery and the physical therapy and the time off work after. It's all of it. With some left over." He reached across the table and took her hand, which was rough and red and swollen at the knuckles from twenty-two years of cleaning chemicals, and held it. "You don't have to go back to the hotel after. If you don't want to. You don't have to go back at all."