"The rule's on the wall," Zeke said quietly. "He read it. I watched him read it, his first day. Stood there with the mop bucket like it was a — a monument. He believes it, too. That's the hard part to look at. He believes it for everybody else."
"Chairs are for whoever comes," Odell said, "is a sentence a boy can believe about a room and not about himself. I know. I was fluent in it."
"I remember your fluency." Zeke closed the logbook. "That's why I called you and not— oh, I could have done it myself. I've opened doors for that boy for two weeks. Doors I open, he understands as my kindness, and my kindness is a wonderful thing but it has an expiration — I'll be gone, and then the door's just a door again, and he'll be standing where you're sitting, watching some other boy orbit. It has to be the owner once, Odell. Not the rule. The owner. A boy learns what a place is from what its owner does when nobody's making him." He stood, with the small ceremony his knees now required, and picked up his logbook, and nodded toward the red car Odell had parked in the customers' row, out front, in the ordinary sun. "And it has to be that car. Not the one on the platform. The platform one's the store's dream of itself. Yours is the one with the pecan dust in the floor mat and fifty-seven years in it. Bring it around to the front of the glass, where he can see it from where he's standing. Then go open his door."
Odell brought the car around himself. It seemed to him, walking out into the Saturday sun for the keys, that he had been rehearsing this small drive for a year and a half without knowing it — every restitution letter, every framed rule, every audit read aloud in rooms that would rather have been anywhere else, all of it had been approach work for a journey of ninety feet: from the customers' row to the front of the glass, where he parked his own red convertible in the delivery spot, in full view of the platform, with the top down and the engine ticking as it cooled, and went inside to fetch a porter.
The boy had migrated, in the Odell-less interval, to the service corridor with a bucket, and was doing something industrious and unnecessary to a door handle when Odell found him.
"Jaylen," Odell said.
The boy came to attention the way boys do for owners, which was exactly the problem, and exactly the appointment. "Yes, sir. Mr. Barnes. I was just— the handle was— yes, sir."
"Leave the handle. I need a porter." Odell turned and walked, not fast, and the boy fell in half a step behind with the bucket still in his hand until he thought better of it and set it down and followed empty-handed, the way porters follow, into the showroom's light. Odell led him past the platform where this year's red car turned in its dream of itself, and out the front doors — the chime chimed for them, indiscriminate as rain — and down the steps to the delivery spot, where Odell's own convertible sat in the sun with the dust of the orchard road still on its flanks and his wife's hat forgotten, as it perennially was, on the back seat.
"This one's mine," Odell said. "Bought it here, a year ago last April. At the bank's rate — ask Miss Boateng; she witnessed the pen." He walked around it once, the chauffeur's walk, and the boy walked with him, and when they came to the driver's side Odell stopped, and took hold of the door handle, and opened the driver's door of his own car wide, the way porters open doors, with the whole arm, presenting it.
"Sit in it a minute," Odell said. "Go on. Get the feel of what you're selling."
The boy did not move. Odell watched the field around the car do its ancient work in the boy's chest — watched his eyes go to the cream leather and the wheel and the long red door standing open like an invitation he had been pre-forbidden to accept — and he watched the boy's hand rise a fraction, and think better of the fraction, exactly as it had at the platform, exactly as a hand had risen and fallen in Albany in 1966.
"Sir," Jaylen Moss said, with great care, "I don't want to get it dirty. I've been on the rack all morning. My hands—"