The truck made the complaining noise again on the way down Riverside Drive, the one that had started as a tick in March and ripened by October into a sound like a spoon in a garbage disposal, and Odell Barnes turned the radio up out of habit and then turned it back down out of honesty. A man who had sold machines for fifty-seven years knew better than to drown out what a machine was telling him. The F-150 was eleven years old and had carried him through two droughts, one tornado cleanup, and every pecan harvest since he turned sixty-two, and it was dying the way old work things die, a piece at a time, each piece more expensive than the last one's dignity.
His wife had settled the matter at breakfast. Earline Barnes did not raise her voice; she had not needed to raise her voice since approximately 1979. She set his plate down, she set her own down, and she said, "Odell, I have listened to you nurse that truck for two years like it's a relative. It is not a relative. It is a truck. Today you are going to drive it to your own store, and you are going to let your own people sell you a car, and you are going to stop arriving everywhere smelling of hot oil."
"I have a car," he said. "I have the wagon."
"The wagon is mine and you know it. You have a farm truck held together by optimism. Fifty years I have watched you put every human being in three states into a nice car, and the founder of the Barnes Motor Group rides around like the man who comes to fix the air conditioning." She buttered her toast with the air of a judge signing an order. "Buy the red one."
He did not ask which red one. There was only one red one, and they both knew it, and they had both known it since the spring, when the new model year arrived at the flagship store in Macon and Odell had driven past the showroom glass four times in one week on errands that did not require driving past the showroom glass. It was a convertible, deep red, with a cream interior and a hood long enough to land a small plane on, and it cost more than the first house he and Earline had ever owned, and he had wanted it with a wanting he recognized, because it was the same wanting he had carried around in his chest at sixteen years old, when wanting was all a lot porter was allowed to do.
He parked at the back of the lot, out by the service entrance, where the employees parked and where the pecan dust from his boots would not be the first thing the morning saw. He was wearing his farm jacket — canvas, torn twice and mended twice at the left cuff, older than most of the sales staff — and jeans, and the boots he wore in the orchard, and a cap that said nothing at all. He had not dressed down. He had simply dressed, the way he dressed every day he was not required to be somewhere in a suit, and he had come straight from walking the rows with his orchard manager because Earline's order had said today, and today had started, as all his days started, with the trees.
The showroom at Barnes of Macon was the finest room Odell owned and the one he spent the least time in. Forty feet of glass. Tile like still water. The cars arranged with the unhurried confidence of jewelry in a case, and at the center of it, on the rotating platform he had insisted on thirty years ago over the objections of three architects, the red convertible turned very slowly, catching the morning and giving it back.
He stood inside the door a moment, the way he always stood inside the door of any of his eleven stores, doing the arithmetic a founder does without numbers: how many customers, how many staff, who was standing, who was sitting, where the coffee was and whether anyone had been offered any. Two couples were being served. A young woman alone was looking at a small sedan near the window with the particular stillness of a person rehearsing courage. By the door, no one greeted Odell Barnes. He was not offended. He was, for eleven full seconds, simply interested — a man taking a reading on his own instrument.
Then Blake Thornton saw him, and came across the tile at the pace of a man who had already finished the conversation in his head.