Odell Barnes had not come to his store to test it. He wanted that understood, and would say it out loud before this day was done, to the people who would need to understand it most: he had come to buy a car, at his wife's orders, like any other man whose truck had died. But a man who built eleven dealerships out of a porter's broom cannot help reading a floor any more than a doctor can help hearing a cough in a theater. He sat in the waiting room chair — a chair, he noted, with four sound legs and no one forbidden from it — and he watched his store work.
The service waiting room at Barnes of Macon had been remodeled sometime in the last two years without Odell's signature on anything he could remember, and it showed the way all such rooms show: somebody's nephew had chosen the chairs. They were low, modern, upholstered in a gray that hid everything, and arranged facing a television that played a cooking program with the sound off. There was a child's drawing taped to the wall behind the coffee machine — a crayon car, red, with four wheels of different sizes — and Odell studied it longer than the television, because it was the only thing in the room that had been made by a person who loved cars.
His truck was genuinely in the shop. That part had required no invention. He had swung around back on his way in and found Del Kimbrough — no kin to anybody, just the service manager for nineteen years — and told him the transmission was going, and Del had said, "Going? Mr. Barnes, that transmission went. It's sending you postcards." They had agreed the truck would be looked at and nothing would be rushed, and Del, who had known Odell for two decades and knew better than to make a ceremony of him, had simply nodded when Odell said he'd wait in the waiting room "like a civilian" and buy himself a car while he was at it. Del had laughed and then stopped laughing, because Odell did not usually joke about buying cars, and said, "Sir, you own the cars."
"That's what Earline says," Odell had said. "She says that's the problem."
So he watched. Watching was, in truth, the whole of his education. He had never been to college. He had been to ten thousand showroom floors in his mind by standing still in one and letting the room explain itself, and the room at Barnes of Macon that morning began explaining itself at once, fluently, in a language he wished he did not speak so well.
The young woman by the window was twenty-seven or so, in scrubs under a zippered jacket, with a tote bag and a folder — a folder, he noted, which meant papers, which meant preparation, which meant a person who had done her arithmetic at her kitchen table and come to be taken seriously. She had been looking at the small sedan for six minutes when a salesman found her. It was not Blake; it was a younger man, mid-twenties, with a tablet and a lanyard and a manner he had plainly learned by standing near Blake the way apprentices have always learned, by breathing the same air. He greeted her with real warmth — Odell gave him that — and then, inside of ninety seconds, with her folder unopened and her questions unasked, he began the migration. Odell had seen migrations on his floors before and had fired them off his floors before. The young man was steering her, with jokes and sympathy and the practiced gravity of a concerned older brother, away from the car she had come to see and toward the back corner of the showroom where the oldest sedan on the inventory sat under the least forgiving light — a leftover, a two-year-old model in a color the factory had discontinued, the kind of car a store keeps the way a kitchen keeps a stain.
"Now this one," the young man said, his voice carrying pleasantly through the interior window, which Odell reflected had been designed by an architect who understood nothing about sound, "this one's the sleeper pick. Same guts as the new one, basically, and I can do things on this one I just can't do on the new inventory. For where you're at — first new car, building credit — this is the smart money." He said building credit the way a doctor says a diagnosis: kindly, and as if it were not a guess he had made from her scrubs and her tote bag. The young woman — a badge clipped to her tote said TIANA R. and underneath, in smaller print, a hospital's name — looked at the old sedan the way a person looks at a coat they are being told is their size. She did not argue. Odell watched her not argue, and something in his chest filed it, carefully, in the place where he kept things he intended to answer for.