The audit decided about Blake Thornton on a Tuesday in May, and it decided the way Odell had promised it would decide: on evidence, in a room with the lights on, with the interested parties present and the uninteresting ones too. The evidence was not a number. Numbers had been tried, in that building, and numbers had learned to behave. The evidence was a season.
Keisha's report — for the compliance office had kept the lot assignment under review the way it kept everything now, in writing — contained the logbook Zeke had maintained without being asked: ninety days of door duty and wash rack, attendance like a metronome, and annotations in a porter's pencil hand that the Atlanta office first tried to summarize and then, wisely, simply attached. Customer taken to service in the rain, own umbrella, came back wet. Man came in angry about a letter, not ours, sat him down, got him coffee, got the manager he asked for, did not argue the letter. Knows thirty-one customers' names I never taught him. Asks the old ones about their grandchildren. Learning the second page.
The last annotation, dated the final Friday, was in different handwriting only in that it was slower: I would buy a car from him now. That is not a small sentence from me. — E.B.
"Well," Odell said, in the upstairs room, with Blake standing where supplicants stand and Zeke sitting where Zeke sat, which was wherever he chose, "the audit's conclusion is that the group misused you nearly as thoroughly as you misused it. You were hired for a gift and trained in a direction, and the direction had a finance office at the end of it paying bonuses on your worst instinct. That doesn't acquit you. It indicts the rest of us first, which is the correct order, and it's why the recommendation is reinstatement — to the floor, at the flagship, under the posted rules, with every jacket you touch going through the mirror like everyone else's, forever. Not because you've been punished enough. Because punishment was never the instrument. The instrument—" he glanced at Zeke — "was curriculum, and the curriculum's author has signed off on the student."
Blake stood with his salesman's posture trying to reassemble itself around news it had not rehearsed for. "Sir, I expected— I had prepared to be let go. I cleaned out — I don't have a desk."
"Your desk went to Lorna Beckett, who is better at it than you were, so you'll take the small one by the service door, where the traffic is worst and the customers are angriest, and you'll keep it." Odell folded his hands. "One more term, and it's mine, not the audit's. The first car you sell back on my floor, you sell it the whole way — greet, seat, coffee, the car they came to see, the rate the bank offers, the paperwork open on the desk. And when it's done you'll call me and tell me the customer's name. Not the unit. Not the gross. The name. If you can remember the name a week later, Blake, you'll do. If you can't, the lot has a bucket with your name on it too."
"Yes, sir."
"Zeke." Odell turned. "You've something to add. You've had something to add since 1966, so let's have it in the record for once."
Zeke regarded the younger man for a long moment, out of the deep and level patience of the wash rack. "Boy, when I started you on that lot, I told my granddaughter you'd last nine days. I want it known I was wrong in front of witnesses; it's good for a man my age to practice." A sound went around the room that wasn't quite laughter, because Zeke wasn't quite joking. "You've learned the door. The door's the easy half. The hard half is the desk — sitting across from a person with the papers between you, knowing their money's on the table and yours is too, and keeping your hands clean when nobody'd know. That's where your gift used to go bad. It won't be the jacket talks you out of it now. It'll be the end of a long month with a number to make, and everybody tired, and the rate sheet right there with room on it that ain't room. When that day comes — " he leaned forward, slightly, a porter instructing a porter — "you remember the nurse's face across my lot in the rain, and you remember which man you were standing in when she decided you might be worth the truth at the true rate. Stay that man. He's employable. The other one isn't, not here, not anymore."