The state, in the end, was more merciful than the newspapers had hoped and more exacting than the group's lawyers had feared. The consent agreement, signed in April, noted the self-report in its first paragraph — the phrase entered by the owner before any complaint stayed in the document, Odell saw to it, the way he'd promised the woman on the telephone — and it bound the group to the jacket mirror for five years, to annual outside audits Keisha would not be permitted to grade herself, and to a compliance monitor who turned out to be a retired judge from Columbus with a porter's grandson somewhere in her own family tree, though Odell never asked and she never said. The fine that was levied was, by the standards of such things, a modest one; the monitor's first report called it the strangest file of her tenure, a company that had reported itself with the enthusiasm of a plaintiff. Odell framed neither the agreement nor the report. He had the two rules by the doors already, and a founder's plaque, and he had decided that a wall should hold instructions, not trophies.
It was the monitor's clerk, in fact, who asked the question that closed the winter. Delivering the signed copies to Macon, young, incurious in the way of clerks, glancing at the plaque and the frame beside it as they waited for the elevator of paperwork: "The chairs are for whoever comes — sir, did you really write that in 1966, or is it, you know, a brand thing they added later?"
Odell considered the young man, and the two texts on his wall, and the whole distance between a rule and its remembering.
"Son," he said, "in 1966 I couldn't sit in them. Writing it came later. Meaning it took longest of all."
He bought the car on the last Saturday of April, because Earline had put it on the calendar in ink, in the square of her own hand, the way she scheduled dentists and grandchildren, and had written beside it, in parentheses, (non-negotiable). She drove him to the store herself in the wagon and came in on his arm through the front doors, in her church coat, with her purse over her forearm and the air of a woman attending a wedding she has personally arranged. The showroom had been told nothing — Odell had forbidden it with unusual force; "If there's a fuss, I'll buy a tractor instead and leave it in the will as a lesson" — but a showroom is a village, and villages know, and the staff of Barnes of Macon that Saturday had the bright, contained expectancy of people at a surprise party who have been told the guest of honor is armed.
The car sat on its platform in the spring light. This year's shade of red was one shade deeper than October's, or perhaps the same and he was one winter older; either way, he looked at it standing beside his wife of fifty years and felt the wanting arrive exactly as it had arrived at sixteen — undiminished by being, at last, permitted.
The salesman who approached them was not Blake. Blake was still on the lot, in his third and final month; it was the woman from Perry who had taken his desk, a calm professional named Lorna Beckett — Beckett, no pencil codes, a reputation for reading contracts aloud to frightened first-time buyers at the speed of church — and she approached the founder of the Barnes Motor Group the way the framed rule by her own door instructed: she greeted them, by name, because a greeter learns the important names; she offered them seats, and coffee, and time; and she asked, with her tablet lowered and her whole attention up, what car they had come to see.
"That one," Earline said, before Odell could open his mouth, and pointed like a prosecutor resting her case. "He's been driving past it since March of last year, in a truck that sounded like a cement mixer, telling me about the pecan market. We will take it today, if the paperwork can survive us, and I would like it noted that I dressed him for this. The jacket is in the wagon. He is not to be sold a different car on account of his boots, which I am given to understand has happened in this establishment to better men than him."
"Yes, Mrs. Barnes," Lorna said gravely, and only the very corners of her mouth confessed anything. "I'll bring the jacket-maker's paperwork right to the good chairs."