was dark brown and thick, and he wore it slicked straight back from his forehead with a product that cost thirty-eight dollars a jar, because the year he started selling cars an older salesman had told him that slicked-back hair made a man look like he had money, and money was what people wanted to buy from. He had believed it then. He was not sure, now, whether he still believed it, but he had been doing it for so long that he did not know how to stop.
He wore a navy blue suit. Two pieces, dark as midnight, single-breasted, cut close. A white shirt, crisp, so crisp that he paid a dry cleaner on Western Avenue extra to put more starch in the collar than they did for anybody else. A red tie, bright and glossy, the red of a fire engine, a power tie, the same color he had worn every working day for twelve years, because the same older salesman had told him that red was the color of a closer. Black shoes, polished to a mirror shine. And on his left breast pocket, a small rectangular brass name tag, engraved in black capitals: DEREK LAWSON. SENIOR SALES CONSULTANT.
He had been a senior sales consultant for six years. Before that he had been a sales consultant for four years, and before that, for two years, the kid at the end of the line who got the walk-ins nobody else wanted. He had been very good at it. He had been, for a long time, the best. He had won the dealership's salesman of the year award four times. There was a plaque with his name on it on the wall of Rick Halloran's office. There was a framed photograph of him shaking hands with a regional vice president of the manufacturer at a conference in Las Vegas. He had sold, in twelve years, more than two thousand cars.
He had been good at it because he understood people. Or he believed he did. He believed that within ten seconds of anybody walking through the doors of the showroom, he could tell what they were going to buy, how much they were going to spend, and whether they were going to buy it from him today or walk out and buy it somewhere else next week. He could read it in their shoes and their watches and their handbags and their haircuts and the way they walked across the floor. He was almost never wrong. He called it reading the lot. And he had built his career on spending his time on the people who were going to buy, and not wasting one minute on the people who were not.
But for the last three months, it had not been working.
He did not understand why. The market was down, everybody said. Interest rates. Inventory problems. The new electric models that nobody wanted. All of that was true, and Derek told himself it was the reason. But there was another reason too, a reason he did not tell himself, because it was too frightening to look at directly, and it was this: he had stopped being able to read the lot.
He had started getting it wrong. A young couple in sweatpants and sneakers, whom he had walked right past on the way to a man in a cashmere coat, had bought a fully loaded sedan from Tanner Voss with cash, and the man in the cashmere coat had test-driven three cars and then gone home and bought a used one online. A woman in scrubs who looked like she had just come off a twelve-hour shift, whom he had left sitting in the lounge for forty minutes because he was sure she was just there for an oil change, had turned out to be a surgeon, and had bought two cars from Josh Kim and told Rick Halloran on her way out that she would never come back as long as Derek Lawson worked there. And last week, an old man in a beautiful three-piece suit and a gold watch had spent six hours with Derek over two days, test-driving every model on the lot, drinking the dealership's coffee, eating the dealership's cookies, talking about his yacht and his house in Florida and his late wife's love of convertibles, and then, at the very end, sitting in Derek's office with a pen in his hand over the contract, had admitted that he did not actually have any money at all, and had only wanted, he said with tears in his eyes, to spend some time with someone who would talk to him.
Derek had lost the whole of the previous Saturday to that old man. A Saturday at the end of the quarter, the busiest day of the month. He had missed four other customers. He had gone home that night and sat in his car in the driveway of the small rented house where he had lived since the divorce and hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand until it hurt.