At the back of the garage, there was a wall. And on the wall, in a row, there were photographs. Old ones and new ones. Black and white and color. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Men and women standing beside black cars, in chauffeur's caps and without them, smiling, squinting into the sun. Under each photograph there was a small brass plate with a name and two dates. The date they started. And, under some of them, a second date. And at the very end of the row, at the far left, there was a photograph older than all the others, cracked and faded, of a skinny young Black man in a chauffeur's uniform, standing beside a long black 1966 Cadillac Fleetwood in front of a small house with a picket fence, beside an old white woman in a flowered housedress and a cardigan, who had her hand on his arm. Under it, the brass plate said: CALVIN BOOKER. 1974. And, beneath it, a second plate: MRS. OPAL TURNBULL, WHO GAVE HIM HIS FIRST CHANCE.
Derek Lawson drove the first black Escalade into the garage at ten o'clock in the morning.
The other nineteen came in behind him, in a long slow line, through the big rolling doors at the front of the building, driven by Eli Brooks and Josh Kim and Tanner Voss and Rick Halloran and Hector Ruiz from the service bay and fourteen Booker drivers who had come over to the dealership that morning to pick them up. They came in one after another, gleaming, enormous, silent, every one of them perfect, their chrome grilles flashing in the light from the tall arched windows, and they rolled to a stop in a long row down the center of the garage floor, and their engines went quiet, one by one, until the whole great room was still.
And then the people came.
There were more of them than Derek had expected. A hundred, maybe more. They came out from the offices at the back and down the iron stairs from the second floor and in through the side doors from the lot, and they gathered in a great loose crowd along both sides of the row of new black cars. Drivers in dark suits. Mechanics in gray coveralls. Dispatchers and office staff and a woman from the front desk carrying a tray of coffee. Some of them were young, barely out of school. Some of them were old, older than Calvin. A tall gray-haired man in a black suit with a Purple Heart pin on his lapel. A small round grandmother in a chauffeur's cap who could not have been more than five feet tall. A young man with prison tattoos on his knuckles and a toddler on his hip. A woman in a hijab, a man with a white cane whom someone was guiding by the elbow, a teenage girl with a clipboard, two men in their seventies arguing loudly and affectionately about the Bears. They stood along the row of new cars and looked at them and touched them, carefully, the way you touch something precious, and talked in low excited voices, and laughed.
Derek got out of the first car and stood beside it and did not know what to do with his hands.
And then Calvin Booker came down the iron stairs from the second floor.
He was wearing what he always wore. The khaki jacket, zipped halfway. The brown and gray plaid shirt. The pleated trousers. The suede loafers, no socks. The tan beret, at its slight angle. He came down the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, with his granddaughter Nia at his elbow, and the crowd parted for him without anyone saying anything, the way water parts, and he walked down the row of new black Escalades, looking at each one, nodding, stopping now and then to run his hand along a fender or look closely at a door seam, and he came to the first one, at the front of the row, and stopped, and looked at Derek Lawson standing beside it.
"Mr. Lawson," he said.
"Mr. Booker."
The old man looked at the car for a long time. Walked all the way around it. Bent, slowly, with a hand on his knee, to look at the wheels. Straightened up. Opened the driver's door and looked inside. Closed it again. Then he turned back to Derek, and his face was serious.
"It's perfect," he said.
"Thank you, sir."
"My head of maintenance tells me they're all perfect. All twenty. He tells me he's never seen anything like it. He tells me somebody at your dealership found a chip in a windshield the size of a grain of rice and had them fly a new one in from Detroit."
"It was a truck, sir. Not a plane."
"Still." Calvin Booker looked at him. Then he turned to the crowd behind him, and raised his voice. Not much. He never needed to raise it much.
"Everybody," he said. "This is Derek Lawson. He's the man who got these cars ready for us. Every one of them. By hand. He's the reason they're perfect." He paused. "I'd like you all to come and shake his hand."