Ezra was quiet so long that the refrigerator finished a cycle and clicked off. "My daughter says I should tell you about the other thing," he said finally. "Since you've come all this way being honest. She says a man confessing deserves the whole inventory." He got up, unhurried, and took from the top of the refrigerator a dealership envelope — Perry's colors — and from it a folded paper that he laid on the table and smoothed once with a farmer's big hand. It was the Perry store's finance summary. "My rate," Ezra said. "Eleven years of perfect payments with the credit union, eight hundred acres my granddaddy—" he corrected himself — "land that's been in this family since before your store and mine were ideas. And Perry's finance man put me in at two points over what the bank approved, because he could, and I signed it, because I was fifty minutes from home and tired of being looked at wrong that week and I wanted the day over." He looked at Odell levelly, without accusation and without mercy. "I didn't tell you to shame your store, Mr. Barnes. I told you because you've got it in your head that this was your building's sickness. It ain't. It's the trade's sickness. Your building just had the rule against it first, is all. Your mama—" he nodded toward the world beyond the door — "your customers' mamas remember the rule because in sixty years it's the only store that ever had one. Don't let that get away from you while you're busy whipping yourself. Whipping yourself is just another way of making it about the owner."
Odell sat in the farm kitchen with the coffee going cold — the second cold coffee of the story the year had made of him — and heard his friend Zeke's whole philosophy returned to him in another old man's voice: the flaw ain't in the people, and the rule was the machine, and the machine was the chairs.
"Mr. Whitcomb," he said, "when that truck needs replacing — or when your daughter's does, or your hands' do — I'd count it an honor if you'd give Macon the chance to say good morning first. Not a discount. A greeting. The rest we'll earn or we won't."
"Fair ask." Ezra folded the Perry paper away. "I'll tell you one more thing for your drive home. The twenty minutes didn't run me off because I thought your people were rude. Rude I can abide; I've been rained on by professionals. It run me off because I was deciding, standing there, whether the rule my mama remembered was ever real, or whether old people just remember mercies bigger than they were. Turns out it was real." He stood, and put the cap on at last, because they were going out to look at a pecan grove, as men in that country do when the talking is done and the acquaintance is to be sealed. "That puts the burden somewhere different than you think, Mr. Barnes. It ain't on your floor. It's on whoever comes after you. One man's rule is weather. It takes the next man making it climate. You keep that in mind when you're picking who minds your doors."
The managers of the other ten stores came to Macon in February, in the rain, in a mood that the flagship's staff had taken to calling the weather front: eleven general managers and eleven finance directors and a wall of weatherproof folders, summoned to the conference room where the screen still stood, because Odell had decided the screen should live there now, the way a church keeps the bell that once fell.
He opened without ceremony. "You've all had the letters by now, and the new frames by your doors, and some of you have had opinions, which have reached me by the usual channels, gift-wrapped in other people's names. Today we dispense with the channels." He put the flagship's final numbers up first — the 389, the widened audit, the $1.84 million — and let them sit in the room like a relative nobody wanted to claim. "Macon was the worst of us. I want that said by me before it's said by anyone protecting himself with it. But Macon was not the only weather. The same query ran in your stores. Your numbers are in the folders in front of you, store by store, and they are yours the way Macon's are mine: to answer for, out loud, beginning today, in this room, to me."