The boy was a quick study and a careful one, and he had the porter's first essential virtue, which is that he loved the machinery without yet believing it loved him back. He learned the inventory the way choir boys learn hymns. He learned which salespeople took their coffee how. He learned — this took one Saturday, and a drenching — that a customer's umbrella outranks a porter's dry shirt in the moral order of the lot, and he learned it without complaint, and Zeke marked the day in the logbook in the slow hand: The boy got wet correct.
And he learned, because sixteen is sixteen and some lessons are scheduled by the blood, to stand at the edge of the showroom in the slow hour of the afternoon and look at the car on the platform.
This year's red convertible was one shade deeper still than Odell's — or the light in that building kept lying to old men; the boy could not have said, and would not have cared. He looked at it the way it was designed to be looked at and the way no design can fully account for: as a promise the world makes to boys who wash things. He did not touch it. He had not been told not to touch it — that was the uncanny part, the part that kept snagging him. Nobody at Barnes of Macon had told him not to touch anything, except with care. Nobody had forbidden him the showroom chairs, either; he'd eaten his first Saturday lunch in the waiting room, out of the rain, in a chair with four sound legs, because Zeke had nodded at it and said, Sit, boy, that's what it's for.
And yet he hovered, at the platform's edge, with the chamois in his hand and his hand not rising, as if the car had a field around it that only boys without money could feel. Sixty years of that field had blown across two lots and eleven stores and one long American century of doors, and it did not need a Mr. Cates anymore to maintain it. It maintained itself, in the chests of sixteen-year-olds, who arrive pre-forbidden, having absorbed from the air of the world the lesson that some seats are not for them.
Zeke saw it from the service door on the boy's second Saturday, and said nothing, and went home thoughtfully, and on Sunday, after church, he telephoned the farm.
"Odell," he said, when his friend came on the line, in the tone of a man delivering a tide table. "You busy next Saturday?"
"I'm seventy-four, Zeke. I'm busy at the speed of honey."
"Come down to the store in the morning, then. Not early. Ten-ish. There's a boy on my lot needs a door opened, and I find I'm particular about whose hand does it the first time." A pause, in which sixty years changed places between them like weather. "Bring the red car. Yours, I mean. Seems right it should be the one he's already met. And Odell — wear the suit if you want. It won't matter. He's not going to be reading your jacket. He's going to be reading the door."
Odell drove the red car to Macon on Saturday morning with the top down, because Earline, consulted on the weather, had looked at the sky and at him and said, "If you're going to be a parable, Odell, at least be a well-ventilated one." He took the long way, past the orchard rows in their spring order, down the two-lane where the farm trucks waved at any convertible and a red one in particular, and he thought — with the wind doing to his hair what was left of it — about errands. He had run a year's worth of them in this car: to the farm supply, to church, to a grandson's ball games where the other grandfathers arrived in the vehicles of their actual lives and Odell arrived in his parable and took the teasing like a tithe. Earline rode beside him on Sundays and held her hat and pronounced the legroom a scandal, weekly, as a liturgy. The car had done everything he'd asked of it, including the only hard thing: it had waited fifty-seven years without going anywhere.