He turned toward the Meridian. Up close, under the spotlight, he could see the print the old man had left, a faint arc of oily curves along the shoulder of the hood. He pulled a microfiber cloth from his back pocket and rubbed at it, and it came away clean in two strokes.

He stood there holding the cloth, and the unease he had been ignoring rose slowly, like water in a basement.

"Brandon."

Lucy had come around her desk. She stood a few feet away with her arms crossed, her headset still tangled in her hair. She did not look angry. She looked disappointed in a way that was much worse.

"Don't," he said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say it with your face."

"Okay," she said. "Then I'll say it with my words. That man didn't do anything wrong."

"He put his hands on a hundred-and-eighty-four-thousand-dollar car."

"It's a car, Brandon. It's here to be looked at."

"It's here to be sold." His voice rose again, then broke, and he lowered it with an effort. "Look. I get it. I was harsh. But do you know how many time-wasters we get in here? Every day? People wandering in off the street, touching things, asking for free coffee, tying up the floor? I can't afford to lose time right now. I can't."

He heard the crack in his own voice and stopped.

Lucy was quiet for a moment. Her eyes moved over his face, and Brandon had the strange, exposed sensation of being read. Lucy had been working the front desk for eighteen months. She knew who got phone calls from collection agencies. She knew who ate lunch in his car so no one would see how little he ate. She had never said a word about any of it.

"Something is going on with you," she said, "and I'm sorry about it. But what you did just now wasn't about the car."

"Don't psychoanalyze me."

"I'm not. I'm just telling you what I saw." She uncrossed her arms. "He wasn't looking at the car like a customer. He was looking at it like—I don't know. Like it was somebody's face."

Brandon opened his mouth, closed it, and looked away.

"He was seventy if he was a day," Lucy said. "And he said I'm sorry. To you. You yelled at him in front of everyone, and he apologized."

"Then he can come back and apologize again when he's got a deposit."

He regretted the sentence as soon as it was out. It sounded exactly like what it was, the kind of thing a man says to rebuild a wall after it has been knocked down. Lucy shook her head slowly and went back to her desk.

Across the showroom, the door to the glass-walled manager's office opened. Marcus Doyle, the general manager, stepped out buttoning his jacket. He was a heavy, tired-looking man of fifty-two, with a gray mustache and a habit of rubbing his thumb across his knuckles when he was thinking. He looked at the floor, at the Meridian, at the three salesmen suddenly very busy with their phones.

"Everybody all right out here?" he asked. "I thought I heard shouting."

"Just a customer misunderstanding," Brandon said smoothly. "Handled."

Marcus's gaze lingered on him. "Handled how?"

"He wasn't a buyer. Wandered in, put hands on the Meridian. I asked him to step away."

"You asked."

"Firmly."

Marcus's thumb rubbed his knuckles once, twice. Brandon could not read his face. After a moment the manager nodded slowly.

"All right. Staff meeting in five minutes, everybody. Meridian announcement." He turned back toward his office, then stopped. "Lucy. Did you see this?"

"I saw," Lucy said.

"Anything I should know?"

She looked at Brandon. He looked at the floor.

"I'll talk to you after," Lucy said.

Marcus nodded and went inside. Brandon exhaled through his teeth, and the sound seemed enormous in the quiet showroom. Outside, the rain thinned to a drizzle. The far corner of the lot beneath the maple tree was empty now. The old truck was gone.

He did not see what Lucy was looking at. She had stepped out from behind the reception desk and bent toward the floor near the base of the Meridian's platform, where something small and metallic was winking up at her under the spotlight.

It was a brass pin, no bigger than a thumbnail, worn smooth on its edges. When she picked it up and turned it over, she saw letters stamped into the back in tiny, careful type. She read them once, then again. Then she closed her fingers around it and, without a word, slipped it into her pocket.

Forty Years of Rain

Walter drove home the long way, along the lake, with the heater blowing warm air against his right leg and nothing at all against his left.