The door of the waiting room opened, and the smell of the lot came in — hot asphalt, tire rubber, the almond sweetness of detailing spray — and with it an old man with a chamois over his shoulder, coming in to get out of the heat and fill a water bottle at the cooler the staff pretended wasn't for customers too.
Odell looked up. The old man looked down. And sixty years fell off the both of them like a coat off a hook.
Zeke Boateng had been filling that water bottle at that cooler, on and off, for the better part of twenty years, though the cooler had been replaced twice and the bottle four times and Zeke himself, the staff liked to say, was original equipment. He was seventy-eight, tall gone slightly stooped, with hands that had gone shiny at the knuckles from decades of cloth and compound, and he wore the store's porter shirt with the sleeves folded to the elbow in the old style, the way men fold sleeves when the folding itself is a kind of credential. He worked three days a week because retiring had not taken — his wife, God rest her, had told the family he'd last eleven days at home and she'd been right to the day — and he worked the lot and the detail bay and the front door at the busy hours, because Zeke greeting a customer was, though no one in management had ever thought to measure it, the single most reliable piece of machinery in the building.
He looked at the man in the second chair from the door. He looked at the coffee gone cold in the man's hand, and the cap that said nothing, and the boots with orchard dust on them, and he looked a second time, the way you look at a photograph of your own youth when somebody else is standing in it.
"Well," Zeke said.
"Well," Odell said.
"You got old."
"You got there first and held the door."
Zeke laughed — one note, surprised out of him — and then, because there was a chair beside Odell's and because no living soul had ever told Ezekiel Boateng what chair was his to warm, he sat down in it with a porter's sigh, set the chamois across his knee like a napkin, and regarded his friend of sixty years in the service waiting room of the Barnes Motor Group.
"You come to inspect us, or you lost?" Zeke said.
"Neither. Truck died. Transmission." Odell turned the cold coffee in his hand. "Earline sent me to buy a car."
At that, Zeke's whole face rearranged itself into something younger. "The red one."
"The red one."
"Sixty years I been waiting to hear you say that sentence in a building with your name over the door." Zeke shook his head slowly, savoring. "You gonna let young Thornton sell it to you? He'll want to see your pay stubs, Odell. He'll want a note from your mama."
"He already gave me the geography lesson," Odell said. "Pre-owned's out back. Priced for the real world. The red one's for people with appointments."
"Hm." Zeke looked through the interior window at the floor, where Blake was now arranging his considerable charm around the couple by the window, and his face did a complicated thing that Odell had seen it do since both of them were boys: sympathy and judgment arriving at the same time and neither one winning. "He's not a bad boy, that one. I want that on whatever record this is. He's quick, he's clean, the customers he likes, he'd carry their groceries to the car in the rain. It's the liking that's the trouble. He thinks the liking is the same as the job." Zeke folded the chamois, unfolded it. "Cates used to do the same arithmetic, remember? By the hat. A man come in with a good hat, Cates was out of that office like the building was afire. A man come in with a working hat, Cates let him bake a while, see if he was serious. He called it—"
"Reading the lot," Odell said.
"Reading the lot. Lord." Zeke was quiet a moment. "We swore on that curb, you recollect, that if either of us ever had chairs—"
"I recollect."
"—the chairs was for whoever come through the door." Zeke nodded toward the showroom. "Now. I've watched you sit here the better part of an hour, friend, and I know that sit. That's the sit you used to do at the other stores before you'd call a meeting. So I'm going to ask you plain, porter to porter: what are we watching?"