Blake was thirty-four, tall in the way showrooms reward, with a tie knotted like a decision and the rested, moisturized look of a man who had never once been rained on professionally. He was the top salesman at the flagship for three years running, and he was very, very good at his job, provided his job is described as selling cars to people who already look like people who buy cars. He had a gift. He could read a customer's clothes the way other men read a credit report — faster, he liked to say at the sales desk, and never wrong yet.
"Morning, sir," Blake said, and the sir had a lid on it. "Can I point you somewhere?"
"Point me?" Odell said.
"Service is around the side, if you're here for service." Blake's hand had come up — not touching him, never touching, a herding hand, open-palmed, floating at the altitude of Odell's elbow, guiding the eye and the body toward the side corridor. "Parts is past service. If you're waiting on a car, the waiting room's got the machine coffee, it's not bad. Now, if it's sales you're after—" and here his smile arrived, the kind one, the patient one, the one for explaining the world — "our pre-owned lot is out back, past the service lane, and I can get one of the fellows out there to walk it with you. They've got some solid trucks back there. Reliable. Priced for the real world."
Odell looked at the hand. He looked at the red car turning slowly on its circle of light, eleven feet away.
"I was looking at that one," he said.
Blake's smile did not move, but something behind it recalculated, and the recalculation was visible the way weather is visible. "Sure," he said. "Everybody looks at that one. That's what she's for — she's the postcard. Let me be straight with you, friend, because I'd want somebody straight with me: that car is spoken for by people with appointments and financing already in place. She runs a little north of ninety, and that's before the bank has its say. A man does himself no favors falling in love at the deep end of the pool. Out back we've got a convertible, too — older, sure, some miles, but the top goes down just the same, and it won't embarrass anybody's wallet. That's the smart play. Can I walk you out there? It'll save you the wait, too — the showroom team, we're booked solid this morning."
Odell Barnes had been sold many things in seventy-three years by men who thought he was somebody else. He had been sold tractors by men who thought he was a hired hand on his own land. He had been sold a suit, once, in Atlanta, by a man who kept steering him to the rack by the register, the one with the word VALUE on a placard, until Earline had arrived like a weather event and taken the man's whole afternoon apart. He had learned long ago that the moment a stranger priced him was the moment the stranger told him everything — not about himself, but about the stranger's whole education. He felt no heat rise. What he felt was older and quieter than heat. He felt sixteen.
"I believe I'll sit a while first," he said. "My truck's around back being looked at. Transmission, most likely. They said it'd be a spell."
"Waiting room's right through there," Blake said, relieved, the herding hand blooming toward the corridor. "Help yourself to the coffee. If one of the fellows from out back is free, I'll send him by." He was already turning, already half gone toward the couple by the window whose clothes had passed inspection, when he remembered one more kindness and delivered it over his shoulder: "And sir — don't let anybody sell you what you don't need. There's a right car for every man. It's just not always the red one."
"Seldom is," Odell said, to the man's back.
He walked himself to the service waiting room, sat down in the second chair from the door, and took the coffee from the machine, which was, as promised, not bad. Through the wide interior window he could see the showroom floor, the turning car, the young woman still standing by the small sedan with her rehearsed courage, and the front doors with the morning coming through them. He settled in with the patience of a man who had spent sixty years learning that a business tells you the truth about itself when it believes you are nobody in particular.