The old man did not say anything. He stood beside the silver Escape with his hand still half raised toward the window, as if he had forgotten it was there, and then he lowered it slowly and put it back in his pocket.
He was not looking past Kade's ear anymore. He was looking right at him, or as near as he could, with his head tipped a little to one side, the way a person looks at a thing they have seen before and are trying to remember where. It was not an angry look. Kade could have handled angry. Kade had handled angry every week of his life. It was something quieter than that, and worse, and he did not want to stand inside it.
"You go on, son," the old man said. "I'll wait."
"For what?"
But the old man had turned back toward the sales tower.
Kade went. He walked fast across the showroom with his coffee going cold in his hand and his face doing the smile, and he told himself, the whole way to the far doors, that he had done the smart thing, the right thing, the thing anybody on the board would have done with ten units and a red circle. He told himself the old man was not going to buy anything. He told himself that a man who could not read a window sticker was not going to sit through a buyer's order and a credit application and a privacy notice and a stack of state forms an inch thick.
He did not let himself think the other thing, the thing that had been sitting low and cold in his stomach since the old man pointed at the glass, which was that it had not been the old man who could not read the sticker. Not really. Not the way Kade could not. The old man had only been asking. Kade had been hiding.
Behind him, on the far side of the showroom, Gert Daws had put down her phone. She was sixty-three, with frosted hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain and a voice like a cast-iron skillet, and she had been about to get up and go over to the old man in the brown jacket herself, out of plain decency and nothing else, when the door of the sales tower banged open so hard it hit the stop.
Starla Beasley did not run on the showroom floor. It was one of the rules she had made when she took over the tower, along with no eating in the vehicles and no calling a woman "young lady" if she was over the age of