twelve. Running made customers nervous. Running made the floor look desperate. In nine years as general sales manager she had walked, fast, through a grease fire in the service bay and a man with a pellet gun in the parking lot and the morning Mr. Quimby's father died at his desk, and she had never once run.
She came down the three steps from the tower now at something very close to it. She was forty-eight, solid, in a black blazer and flat shoes and the small gold hoops she had worn every day since her son bought them for her with his first paycheck from the Dairy Queen. She had her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a stack of deal jackets still in one hand, which she seemed to have forgotten about entirely. The floor watched her cross it. Gert Daws watched her. The two new guys watched her. Kade, at the far doors with his hand on the push bar and the black Tahoe idling just outside, turned around and watched her too.
She went straight to the old man by the silver Escape, and stopped in front of him, and for one second she did not say anything at all. She just looked at the jacket. Then she looked up at his face.
"Mr. Johnson," she said. Her voice was not her floor voice. It was not any voice Kade had heard her use. "Mr. Johnson! So nice to see you again."
The old man's face changed. It did not do much. It just went, all at once, from careful to something else, the lines around his eyes folding up like a road map going back into a glove box.
"Hello, Starla," he said.
"I saw the jacket from upstairs. I saw it from all the way up there. I said, there is only one jacket like that in the state of Kentucky." She laughed, and it caught halfway, and she put her free hand on his arm, on the worn cord just above the elbow patch, and left it there. "Look at you. Look at you. How long has it been? Treyson's graduation?"
"Two thousand twenty. In the football stadium, with everybody six feet apart."
"You remember that."
"You had a sign. It had his name on it in glitter. You couldn't stop crying, and they were calling the names alphabetical, and he was a B, so you cried for an hour and fifteen minutes."
"I did. I did do that." She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand, quickly, the way a person does when they are at work and know it. "And Mrs. Johnson? How is she?"