They did it all. That was Earline's stipulation and, though she didn't know the phrase, Odell's whole theology: all of it, in daylight, at the ordinary speed, with the paperwork open on the desk between them like a shared document. Lorna brought the buy-rate sheet — the posted sheet, the same one stapled into every jacket in the building — and clipped the group's own lender approval beside it, and the numbers matched, because now they could do nothing else. Keisha Boateng came down from compliance to witness the founder's contract the way notaries witness wills, and stood behind the desk with her hands folded and said nothing at all except, once, when Odell paused over the signature line with the pen uncapped: "Take your time, sir. It's a good pen. It signs everybody the same."
He signed. Earline signed as witness, in a hand like iron filings. The title clerk — the same young woman who had been so frightened in October's stairwell of managers — brought the keys on a plain ring, not a presentation box, because Odell had once told the whole group that a key is not jewelry, and set them on the desk, and Odell Barnes picked up the keys to his own car, bought with his own money from his own store at the bank's own rate, and sat holding them a moment like a man holding a sacrament he is not sure he's worthy of, which of course he wasn't, which was rather the point of sacraments.
Then there was the matter of the car itself, which had to come down off the platform and be delivered — washed, fueled, detailed to the standard of the house. The standard of the house, that Saturday, presented itself in a porter's shirt with a chamois over one shoulder and a bucket in the other hand, and Blake Thornton washed the founder's convertible in the wash rack in full view of the showroom glass, slowly, panel by panel, the way you wash a car for a funeral or a wedding, getting the wheels last and the glass twice. Nobody had assigned him the car. Zeke had asked, at the morning huddle, who wanted the honor, and had looked at no one in particular, and Blake's hand had gone up first — and Zeke, who understood ceremonies the way priests understand weddings, had simply nodded and handed him the good bucket, the one without the grit in it that nobody talks about.
When it was done — top down, in the April sun, at the front of the store with the doors standing open — Blake brought it around himself and got out and stood holding the driver's door, and Odell came down the steps with Earline on his arm, and the two men faced each other across the open door of the red car.
"I was going to give you the whole speech," Blake said. "I had it ready since January. Zeke told me to throw it away and just hand you the door."
"Zeke's a wise man."
"He says a door handed right is worth a speech." Blake swallowed. "Mr. Barnes. In October I told you the red car wasn't for people like you. I've had a hundred and sixty days to think about who I thought people like you were. I had a list in pencil. I'm — " The speech he had thrown away kept trying to stand up in him; Odell could watch it happening. "I'm sorry I was the floor you had to fix. I'm sorrier about the ones who never got a — " He stopped, and did the thing Zeke had taught him, which was to finish honestly or not at all. "She came back, you know. Miss Ross. Signed her new contract at the true rate, right where I could see her do it. I think about that more than I think about you. I think that's probably correct."
"I think it is too," Odell said.
Earline got into the passenger seat with the ceremony of a queen boarding a barge, arranged her purse, and pronounced the cream leather acceptable and the legroom a scandal. Odell walked around the car once — the porter's walk, the chauffeur's walk, hands light on nothing, sixty years of other men's cars in his fingertips — and then he got in behind the wheel of the red convertible he had been forbidden, at sixteen, even to sit in, in a showroom in Albany where the chairs were not for him.
He sat a moment with his hands at ten and two.
"Well?" Earline said.
"Well," Odell said, and started the car, and the sound it made was worth every year of the wait, and was, like most things worth the wait, mostly valuable for who was sitting beside him while it made it. He drove his wife home through Macon at the speed of a parade of one, and the pecan dust on his boots marked the floor mat, lightly, permanently, the way honest use marks anything loved — and he did not wipe it off. Some signatures belong on the contract. Some belong on the car.