And they did.
One by one, they came. The tall gray-haired veteran with the Purple Heart, whose name was Odell, and whose handshake was like a vise. The small round grandmother in the chauffeur's cap, whose name was Gloria, who had started driving for Booker eleven years ago after her husband died and said it had saved her life, and who did not shake his hand but pulled him down to her height and kissed him on the cheek. The young man with the prison tattoos and the toddler, whose name was Andre, and who said, quietly, Mr. B hired me the week I got out, nobody else would even call me back, and whose little girl reached out and grabbed Derek's red tie in her fist and would not let go until her father pried her fingers loose. The woman in the hijab, whose name was Samira, and who had been an engineer in another country and drove now while she studied for her license exams here. The man with the white cane, whose name was Leon, who was the head dispatcher, and who had not been able to see for nineteen years, and who knew where every single one of the hundred and thirty-nine cars was at every moment of every day. The two old men arguing about the Bears, whose names were Herbert and Clyde, and who had both been driving for Calvin since nineteen seventy-nine, and who each told Derek privately that the other one was the worst driver in the company.
He shook all of their hands. Every one. He asked every one of them their name.
It took a long time. Nobody seemed to mind.
Eli Brooks's mother was there too. Calvin had invited her. She came in a borrowed wheelchair, because the surgery on her left knee had been eight days before and the right one was scheduled for December, and Eli pushed her in through the side door from the lot in his black graduation suit, which he had finally had taken in at the sleeves, and parked her at the end of the row of new cars, beside the first one. And Calvin Booker, when he saw her, left the crowd and came over and bent down, slowly, with a hand on his knee, and took both of her hands in his, and the two of them talked for a long time in low voices, and at one point Denise Brooks laughed so hard that she had to put a hand on her new knee to steady it, and Calvin laughed too, and Derek, watching from a few feet away, heard the old man say the name Reggie, and something about Al Green, and the airport, and a client from New York who had tipped a hundred dollars just to make him stop singing.
When they had finished, Denise looked up and saw Derek standing there, and her face changed. She knew who he was. Of course she knew. Eli had told her everything.
Derek walked over to her. He did not know what he was going to say. He stopped beside the wheelchair.
"Mrs. Brooks," he said. "I'm Derek Lawson. I work with your son."
She looked up at him for a long moment without speaking. A small, tired, sharp-eyed woman in her fifties in a church dress and a cardigan, with her hands folded in her lap and her left leg in a brace stretched out in front of her.
"I know who you are," she said.
"I wanted to tell you," Derek said, "that your son is the best salesman at our dealership. I didn't know that, five weeks ago. I didn't even look at him. I should have." He swallowed. "He was the only one of us who did the right thing that morning. The only one. He's going to be better at this than I ever was. I just wanted you to know."
Denise Brooks looked at him a while longer. Then she looked over at her son, who was standing beside one of the new Escalades with Josh Kim and Tanner Voss and a Booker driver named Andre, and who was laughing at something, with his round glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking, for the first time since he had started at Prestige Cadillac, completely at ease.
"I know he is," she said quietly. "I've always known." Then she looked back at Derek, and something in her face eased, just slightly. "But thank you for saying it. Not everybody would."
Nia Booker found him a few minutes later, standing by himself near the big rolling doors, watching the crowd. She was not wearing a trench coat today. She was wearing jeans and a Booker Executive Transportation sweatshirt with the gold B on the front, and she had a cup of coffee in each hand, and she held one of them out to him without saying anything.