The truck from Perry sat in the yard by the barn, new, dark green, still wearing its dealer's plate frame. Odell parked Earline's wagon behind it — his own truck, repaired, had been sold, in the end, to Del Kimbrough's nephew for exactly what it was worth, which was what Del said it was worth, Del being an honest man — and he walked up to the house in a clean shirt with his hat in his hand and knocked on the door of a man he had never met, whose name he knew only because the store in Perry had mentioned, in the trade's grapevine way, where their Saturday cash sale had come from and why.
Ezra Whitcomb answered the door himself. He was bigger than Odell remembered, or perhaps the doorway framed him; he had the cap in his hand again, out of some reflex of thresholds, and he looked at the old man on his porch and did not know him.
"Mr. Whitcomb. My name is Odell Barnes." Odell watched the name land — the slow recognition, not of a face but of the lettering over a door forty minutes away. "I'm not here to sell you anything. I expect you've had your fill of my company not selling you things. I came to answer for a Friday morning in October, when you stood in my showroom twenty minutes and weren't greeted. I was there. I sat in my own waiting room and watched it happen, and I've thought about those twenty minutes more than any twenty minutes of my year, and I didn't want you getting a form letter about a day you never got paperwork for. Some debts you carry to the man's own door."
Ezra studied him a long while, the way farmers study anything that arrives unannounced: weather, salesmen, scripture, and old men claiming to be apologies.
"You sat and watched it," he said at last.
"I did."
"Hm." Ezra stepped back and held the door. "You'd better come in, then. A man who'll confess to the watching ought to get to do it sitting down."
The kitchen was clean and bright and smelled of coffee and the ghosts of a thousand breakfasts. Ezra's wife had been gone three years — Odell learned this in the way such things are learned in farm kitchens, from the second chair's angle and the single cup in the sink and the way Ezra said we about the farm and I about the house. She had kept the books; since her, a daughter over in Byron kept them, and came Sundays. The truck had been the daughter's idea too: his old one had 240,000 on it and she had read him an article. He had gone to Macon first because Macon was nearer and because his father, in 1979, had bought a car from a Barnes lot — in Albany, from a salesman who'd kept the widow — Ezra's mother — in the good chair with coffee for the whole of a long afternoon while the paperwork crawled.
"I remember that store had a rule," Ezra said. "My mama told it for years after. She said they treated her like she was the only money in Georgia." He turned his cup. "So I went to Macon expecting — I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe to be recognized by a building. Which is foolishness. Buildings don't know your mama."
"No," Odell said. "But they're supposed to be built so they don't have to. That's the part I let rot, Mr. Whitcomb. The rule your mama remembered was mine. I wrote it, and I hung it, and then I went off to be a founder at conferences and let my own store unlearn it a pencil mark at a time. By October my floor had a code for men like you — I won't repeat it; it isn't fit for your kitchen — and my finance office had a price for the code. You got the mildest version of it, which is nothing at all. Twenty minutes of nothing, and a drive to Perry. The people who stayed got the rest."
"You drove forty minutes to tell me this."
"I drove forty minutes to ask what it would take to make Macon the place your mama described, for the next man in the boots." Odell set his cup down. "I'm not going to insult you by offering to beat Perry's price on a truck already bought and paid for, or asking you to trade it back to us so my conscience can have a ceremony. If the truck serves you, it serves you, and Brent's people in Perry—" he used the other store's name plainly, without rancor — "earned that sale by saying good morning. That's the whole of the lesson and they've already collected their tuition."