Nia looked at him for a long time.
"Pop," she said slowly. "What are you doing?"
"I'm buying twenty cars," said Calvin Booker. "From a dealership near where your grandmother used to get her hair done. That's all." He picked up his keys from the hook by the back door. "And I'm going to see what kind of people they've got working there these days."
"You're going to test them." Nia's voice was flat. "You're going to walk in there dressed like that, and sit down, and see who comes over."
"I'm going to walk in there dressed like I always dress," Calvin said mildly. "And sit down, because my knees hurt. And see who comes over. That's not a test, baby girl. That's just a Tuesday."
Nia opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then, despite herself, she laughed.
"Grandma would kill you," she said.
"Your grandmother," said Calvin, settling his tan beret on his head at its slight angle, "would have come with me. And she'd have worn her good hat."
He drove himself. He always drove himself. He had a hundred and thirty-nine cars and a hundred and forty employees, many of whom were very good drivers, and on any given day at least a dozen of them would have been thrilled to drive the founder anywhere he wanted to go. But Calvin Booker had spent the first eleven years of his working life driving other people around in the backs of black cars, looking at them in the rearview mirror, listening to them talk about him as if he were not there, and he had decided, a long time ago, that he would never sit in the back of a car he could drive himself. So he drove. A plain gray sedan, eight years old, the company's cheapest model, which he had taken out of the fleet when it hit a hundred and fifty thousand miles and kept for himself, because it ran fine and he did not see the point in anything fancier.
He pulled out of the driveway at nine-thirty. It had stopped raining. The streets were wet and shining and the sky was beginning to break up into patches of washed blue. He turned on the radio, which was tuned, as it had been for forty years, to a station that played old soul music, and the Delfonics were singing, and he hummed along under his breath, and thought about Loretta, and about Mrs. Opal Turnbull in her kitchen in Gary, and about a red-faced man with a gold tie clip in a showroom on Michigan Avenue fifty years ago, telling him where the service entrance was.
He was not angry about it anymore. He had not been angry about it for a very long time. He was seventy-three years old, and he had learned that anger is heavy, and that you only have so much room in your arms. But he had never forgotten it. And he had found, over the years, that he liked to know where the service entrances were. It was useful. It told you a great deal about a place, who they sent around the back.
* * *
Derek Lawson had been the top-selling salesman at Prestige Cadillac for nine of the last twelve months, and on the morning Calvin Booker walked through the doors, he was eleven days away from losing his job.
Nobody had told him so in exactly those words. Rick Halloran, the general manager, did not use words like that. Rick was a big soft-spoken man in his late fifties with a white mustache and a fondness for golf metaphors, and what he had said, at the end of the sales meeting on Monday morning, in front of the whole team, standing at the whiteboard with a red marker in his hand, was: Derek, you're in the rough, buddy. Three months in a row under target. I need you back on the fairway by the thirtieth, or we're going to have to have a conversation about whether this is still the right course for you. And then he had capped the marker and smiled and said, okay, everybody, let's go sell some cars, and the meeting had broken up, and nobody had looked at Derek on the way out of the room.
He was thirty-eight years old. He was tall, six foot two, with the lean, square-shouldered build of a man who had played college baseball and still went to the gym five mornings a week, though lately it had been more like three. His face was all angles, a hard jaw and high cheekbones and a straight nose, and he shaved it every morning until it was perfectly smooth, because a salesman with stubble looked like a salesman who had given up. His hair