Denise Brooks did not say anything for a long time. Then she took the bag of frozen peas off her knee and set it on the table, very carefully, beside the contract, and stood up, slowly, wincing, one hand on the edge of the table, and came around the table to where her son was sitting and put both her arms around his head and held it against her chest, the way she had held it when he was small, and rocked a little, side to side, and did not say anything at all.
Eli closed his eyes.
"Reggie always said that man was the best person he ever met," his mother said at last, into his hair. "Said Mr. Booker came to the hospital every single day when Reggie had his heart attack. Every day. Sat with him. Brought him the newspaper. Paid for the private room." She pulled back and held his face in both her hands and looked at him. "You call him tomorrow. You call Mr. Booker and you thank him. You hear me? From me."
"I will, Mama."
"And then you go back to that dealership and you sell some more cars." She let go of his face and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "And you bring every one of those old men a coffee in a real cup."
* * *
Across the city, in a big old brick house with a turret on a tree-lined street on the South Side, Calvin Booker climbed the three flights of stairs to his bedroom at the top of the house, slowly, one hand on the banister, resting on each landing, the way his doctor had told him to and the way he did not like to admit he needed to.
He did not turn on the light. The streetlamp outside the window threw a long pale rectangle across the floor and the foot of the bed. He sat down on the edge of the bed, on his side, and took off his beret, and turned it in his hands for a while, looking at it. Then he set it down on the nightstand, on his side, and looked across the bed at the other nightstand, Loretta's side, where her reading glasses were still lying folded on top of a paperback novel she had not finished, exactly where she had left them four years ago.
"Well, baby," he said quietly, to the dark. "I did it."
The house creaked around him, settling, the way old houses do at night.
"Twenty," he said. "All black. You'd have hated it." He smiled a little in the darkness. "I know. I know. Burgundy. That nice dark green. Next time. I promise." He was quiet for a moment. "I sat across the street from that place for fifteen years, waiting for you to finish at Miss Pearl's. Did you know that? I used to watch them. I used to think about going in. I never did. I never could figure out what I'd say."
He looked down at his hands in his lap. The plain gold ring, worn smooth.
"There was a young man there today," he said. "A salesman. He was rude to me. Real rude. Pointed his finger right in my face. You'd have taken his head clean off." He chuckled softly. "And I wanted to be angry with him, baby. I did. For about two seconds. And then I looked at him and I saw that boy we used to watch out the car window. You remember? The skinny one in the cheap suit who used to go out in the rain to everybody. You said he was going to be good at it. You always could pick them." He paused. "It was him. Twelve years older. Twelve years harder. Somebody got to him. Somebody taught him to look at shoes. And he was so scared, Loretta. He was so scared he could hardly breathe."
The streetlamp flickered outside the window.
"So I asked them not to fire him," Calvin said. "And I asked him to get the cars ready. And I don't know if it'll take. It doesn't always. You know that better than anybody. You watched me give a hundred chances to a hundred people and you watched half of them throw it back in my face." He was quiet for a while. "But I thought about Mrs. Turnbull. And I thought about what you'd say. And I thought, well. One more."
He sat there in the dark for a long time.
Then he lay down on his side of the bed, on top of the covers, in his plaid shirt and his pleated trousers, with his loafers still on, the way Loretta always used to scold him for, and folded his hands on his chest, and looked across at her reading glasses in the pale light from the window, and fell asleep.