His first week back, Blake sold two cars and lost four, and the four he lost taught him more, in the new arithmetic, than the two he sold. He lost a man in a three-thousand-dollar suit by refusing — at the desk, with the folder open — to pretend the lender's approval hadn't come through yet, a small old lie the trade used like a napkin; the man left in a fury at being denied the theater of negotiation and bought in Warner Robins, and Blake wrote the loss in the log without decoration. He lost a young couple by showing them, unasked, the cheaper trim that met their stated budget, which they then went home to think about; they came back eleven days later and bought it, and brought her father, who bought a truck, which in the old accounting would have been luck and in the new one was simply the machine working as designed: the chairs doing the selling. His first completed sale, though — the one Odell had specified, the whole way — was to a lineman from Gray, a broad quiet man named Rupert Stallings, in from a storm-restoration rotation with fourteen days of overtime in his pocket and a wife on speakerphone from their kitchen, who had come in for a work truck and been greeted, seated, coffeed, and shown the truck he came to see, and the second truck, and the numbers for both with the buy-rate sheet paper-clipped where his wife could hear it read aloud line by line. Blake called Odell that evening, at the farm, from the small desk by the service door.
"Rupert Stallings," he said. "Gray. Georgia Power contractor. Bought the gray three-quarter ton, at the bank's rate, and his wife picked the color off a phone photo. He said to tell whoever runs the place that the coffee's better than the courthouse's."
"I'll pass it to the founder," Odell said. "He's particular about the coffee."
A week later, unprompted, from the same desk, the second call: "Still Rupert Stallings, sir. In case the week mattered."
"It does," Odell said. "Keep the bucket handy anyway."
And so the year turned. The monitor's audits came and were read aloud in managers' meetings, shaming paragraphs and all, the way Odell had promised the room they would be. The framed rules by the eleven doors went a little sun-faded and were not replaced with anything glossier. Ezra Whitcomb's daughter bought her car in Macon in the fall — a small SUV, at the rate, after being greeted by name at the door by a porter in his seventies who asked after her father's truck and was told it ran like a watch — and Ezra himself, at Christmas, sent Odell a paper sack of pecans from his own trees with a note in pencil that said only: For the good chair. Odell kept the note in the drawer of the desk at the farm where he kept the important paper: Keisha's first printed spreadsheet, his own yellow pad from October, Earline's calendar page with the inked square and the parenthesis — (non-negotiable) — and, on top, newest, the order form for a car he drove on Sundays with the top down whenever the Georgia weather permitted, which in his judgment, arrived at over fifty years of marriage, was any weather Earline Barnes said it was.
A year to the week after the Friday of the farm jacket, Tiana Ross came back to Barnes of Macon to buy a car, and the building — which had been, for twelve months, a building under instruction — got to sit its examination in public, though nobody announced it as one.
She came in the early afternoon, not in scrubs this time but in a blue dress, with her sister beside her and the folder in her hand, the same folder, a year more worn at the corners. She had been promoted at the hospital in the spring; there had been a small ceremony; her mother had read about it in the church bulletin. The discontinued sedan — the leftover color, the car that had been chosen for her — had carried her through a year of night shifts without a murmur, and she was not trading it out of grievance. She was trading it because her sister's car had died in September, finally and completely, and the sedan was going to the sister, and Tiana Ross, at twenty-eight, with a year of the true rate behind her and her credit burnished by it, was buying the car she had come for the first time.
Blake saw her at the door. He was on the floor — fifteen months now since the wash rack, top three in the store again by a metric the store measured differently and, he had come to believe, more truthfully — and he did the thing that the framed rule required and that no rule could have made him do in the spirit it was done: he crossed the tile at a salesman's pace, unhurried and entire, and greeted her by name before she had cleared the mat.