The farmer came in at twenty past the hour. Odell knew he was a farmer the way you know weather — not by the clothes, though the clothes told it too: a jacket that had been expensive once and honest work ever since, boots too good for fashion and too worn for church. He was broad, late sixties, with a cap in his hands and the particular patience of men who have negotiated with rain. He stood just inside the doors, where customers stand when they are waiting to be discovered, and he waited. Odell timed it without deciding to. A salesman passed him carrying coffee for the couple by the window and did not see him. Blake passed him — Blake, crossing to the desk with a folder — and Blake's famous eye moved across the man the way a light moves across water, and did not stop, and did not slow, and the man might as well have been a coat rack for all the purchase the eye found on him.
Twenty minutes. Odell counted them in coffee and in the cooking show's silent progress. At minute twenty-one the man by the door shifted his cap from one hand to the other, looked once at the red convertible turning in its light, and walked back out into the morning with the unhurried stride of a man who has decided not to make a scene about being unseen. He would drive, Odell knew, to the dealership in Warner Robins or the one in Perry, and he would buy a truck there, probably that week, probably for cash, because men with caps in their hands and farms in their boots usually had cash, and he would tell the story of the Macon store at the feed store and the co-op and his church, not angrily, just completely, the way such stories are told, and it would be true every time he told it.
Odell sat in the nephew-chosen chair and was sixteen years old.
The lot in 1966 had not been his, and it had not been in Macon; it had been in Albany, and it had belonged to a man named Cates who sold cars the way preachers sell sermons, with volume. Odell had been hired to wash them. Sixteen, skinny as a rake handle, with a mother's permission slip and a father's absence and hands that were already learning. The rule of that lot — never written, never once needing to be written — was that porters did not sit in the cars. You could wash a car for an hour, you could know it panel by panel like a face, you could drive it the length of the lot with your back straight and your hands at ten and two like a chauffeur in a film, but you did not sit in it. Sitting was for owners. Sitting was for customers. The porters ate their lunch on a curb out back, in all weathers, on concrete still warm at noon from the sun, and the showroom chairs — the two deep leather chairs by Cates's office, where customers waited for the paperwork of their lives — those chairs were not sat in by porters either, not ever, not for one second, not as a joke. Odell had once, at sixteen, tired past thinking on a July afternoon, lowered himself for one breath into the edge of one of those chairs with a rag still in his hand, and Mr. Cates had come out of his office not angry but amused, which was worse, and had said, "Son, when you've got the money to sit, you'll sit. Till then the chair ain't yours to warm." The other porter that summer — older, seventeen, a boy from Dawson with a gap in his teeth and a memory like a bank vault — had pulled Odell out to the curb afterward and split his own sandwich without being asked, and had said the thing Odell had carried for fifty-seven years like a stone in the pocket: "Remember how it feels, though. When it's your chairs, you remember how it feels to be the boy who can't."
The boy from Dawson's name was Zeke.
Odell became aware, in the waiting room of his own store in his seventy-third year, that he was sitting with his coffee cold and his hands folded like a man in church, and that the young woman in the scrubs — Tiana — had been handed off, with handshakes and relief all around, toward the glass offices at the back where the finance department lived. He knew what happened in those offices. He had built those offices. He had also, once upon a time, built rules for those offices, and he found himself wondering, with a founder's particular dread, whether the rules had been quietly remodeled too — the way the waiting room had been, while he was busy with harvests and boards and the long pleasant fiction that a thing built right stays built.