Blake Thornton learned he was not fired from a piece of paper slid across the upstairs conference table by the human resources director from Atlanta, who had the exhausted courtesy of a woman who had spent a month delivering weather of every kind. The paper was an assignment, not a termination. Three months. Lot and door duty, full time, under the supervision — the paper's exact, merciless phrase — of E. Boateng, Porter. His sales license with the store was suspended, not revoked; his desk was given, temporarily, to a woman from the Perry store; his tie, the paper did not mention, but Blake understood about the tie.
"Porter," he said to the empty room, holding the paper. "He's making me a porter."
"Yes," said Odell, from the doorway, where he had been standing long enough to have heard the whole of the silence that preceded the sentence. "I expect you think it's a punishment designed by a man with a long memory and a taste for poetry. It is a punishment designed by a man with a long memory. But it isn't poetry, Blake. It's curriculum. You were the fastest judge of human beings I have ever employed, and the worst, and a man with a gift that fast has to be retrained where the gift can't hurt anybody while he learns. On the lot, under Zeke, you will greet every human being who comes through my gates, in every weather, in every kind of clothes, and you will wash what you're told to wash, and you will bring coffee to people who are waiting, and you will not sell one thing, or price one thing, or sort one thing, for ninety days. At the end of it, the audit — not my temper — will decide if there's a salesman in this group with your name on him." He paused at the door. "Zeke has forgotten more about customers than you've yet learned about cars. Try not to waste his tuition."
Zeke's curriculum had no syllabus and no mercy in it, though it had a great deal of kindness, which Blake discovered are not opposites. The lot in a Georgia late autumn is a place of specific heats and specific winds; the wash rack at seven in the morning is an education all by itself. Blake learned to move forty cars before the dew burned off. He learned that a chamois has a right side. He learned the door — the actual door, the front gates at the busy hours, standing where Zeke stood, with Zeke three paces back and silent as a fence post — and the door undid him in stages.
Because the door, worked honestly, is a refutation of everything Blake knew. The door does not let you finish the conversation in your head. The door sends you a retired schoolteacher in a car with a hundred ninety thousand miles who wants, it turns out, to buy the most expensive truck on the lot for cash because her late husband always wanted her to have the best and she has decided, at eighty-one, to stop arguing with him. The door sends you a teenager in a fast-food uniform smelling of fryer oil, who is there — the old Blake would have had him coded and gone in eleven seconds — to pick up, with his mother, the sedan his grandfather co-signed for, having saved the down payment out of that uniform for fourteen months. The door sends you men in suits who are lost, and men in overalls who are buying their fourth fleet truck, and a woman in a sari who negotiates like a commodities exchange, and every single one of them arrives in the costume of somebody else's story, and the costume is wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, until a man standing in it long enough begins to suspect the flaw is not in the people.
"The flaw," Zeke said, on the nineteenth day, watching Blake hold an umbrella over a customer's baby seat in a spitting rain neither of them had dressed for, "ain't in the people."
"I didn't say anything," Blake said.
"You didn't have to. It's coming off you like heat." Zeke handed him a dry chamois for the customer's door handle, a refinement Blake would not have imagined in September. "You had a gift, boy. Don't let nobody tell you different, not even me. You can read a human being faster than any salesman I ever watched — faster than Cates. What you couldn't do was read past the first page. You read the jacket and called it the book. All this—" the wet lot, the rows of shining hoods, the whole ordinary cathedral of it — "is just you learning to read the whole book. Some of 'em are long. That's the job. The job was always reading the whole book."