The doors at the back of the showroom banged then, and Tony Russo came through them at a speed that undid his tie. Tony was fifty-two, imported from a group in Ohio two years before with a reputation for polish — polish in his suits, polish in his presentations, polish in the quarterly letters to Atlanta that made the flagship shine like a coin. Someone in service — Del, it would come out later, Del with his nineteen years and his sense of occasions — had finally realized who the civilian in the waiting room was and had telephoned upward, and the news had traveled the building the way heat travels a wire.
"Mr. Barnes," Tony said, arriving out of breath and assembling his face as he came. "Sir. I — had I known, had anyone known—"
"That's the whole of it, Tony," Odell said. "You'd have known how to treat me. It's everybody you don't know I'm worried about." He put the license away. "I'm not firing anybody tonight, and I'm not holding a trial in a showroom after hours like a television program. Here's what's going to happen. Monday, eight o'clock, the conference room upstairs. The whole management of this store: sales, service, and the finance offices. And somebody from F&I is going to bring the numbers on rate discretion for the last two years — all of it, the whole pattern, on the screen, in the light. I don't yet know whose numbers they'll be. But they'll be there."
Tony Russo's polish did a brave thing then; it held for exactly two seconds and then it went somewhere else, and the man underneath it looked out — a man who had signed memos and called them weather, hearing, perhaps for the first time, the sound of the climate changing. "Sir, I think if there's been — I want to assure you that yield management on the finance side is industry standard, every group in the Southeast—"
"Monday," Odell said. "Eight o'clock. Bring your standard with you, Tony. We'll read it together." He looked back at Blake, who had not moved, who was standing by the plaque with his salesman's posture entirely gone out of him, holding nothing. "And Blake. On Monday I'm going to need you to remember the nurse's name. It's Tiana Ross. She told your young man twice. You remember it, and you remember the farmer's face, because you're going to be asked about them by name — not by meanness. By accounting." He picked up his cap from the brochure rack where he'd set it. "Del's keeping my truck till Tuesday. Earline's coming for me in the wagon. Sixty years I've been coming through that door in one direction or another, and I want it noted—" a small, tired, genuine smile crossed him — "that nobody, in all that time, ever once offered me the red car. I had to come buy it myself. There's a sermon in that somewhere, but I'm too old and it's too late in the day to preach it."
He walked out through the front doors of Barnes of Macon into the October dusk, and the sensor above the door — which greeted every customer with a small electronic chime, indiscriminate as rain — chimed for him exactly as it chimed for everyone.
They came up the stairs to the conference room on Monday at eight o'clock the way people come to a funeral in a family they're not sure they're still part of. Sales managers, service managers, the used-car manager, two desk men, a title clerk who wasn't sure why she'd been summoned and was therefore the most frightened person present. Randy Cobb came last, with a leather folio and the rested air of a man who has prepared, over a long weekend, to be very reasonable. Tony Russo sat at the table's side, not its head. The head chair stayed empty for four minutes after everyone else had settled, and nobody commented on it, and everybody looked at it.
Odell arrived in a suit — the harvest notwithstanding, Earline had laid it out, and a suit from Earline's hands was not a suggestion. He carried nothing but a yellow legal pad with one page of writing on it. He did not take the head chair. He took the chair at the middle of the table, among them, which unsettled the room more than the head chair would have, and he nodded to the young woman standing by the screen at the room's end, who had been there since seven arranging cables with hands that shook only slightly.