"Who is he?" Kade said.
Gert looked at him over her reading glasses for a long moment, the way she looked at trade-ins with the carpets shampooed too recently.
"I have no idea," she said. "But I know this. I have worked for that woman nine years. I watched her make sales manager over three men who'd been here longer and had better golf swings. I never saw her come down those steps like that for anybody. Not for the owner. Not for the bishop. Not for the man from Ford Motor Company with the regional numbers." She took off the glasses and let them drop on their chain. "Whatever you said to him, sugar, I'd start thinking about how you're going to unsay it."
Then she pushed open the door and went out into the cold to say good morning to the Burkharts, because somebody had to.
In the office, Starla Beasley set a mug of coffee on the desk in front of Arvel Johnson and then, after a moment, picked it up again and put it into his hands, and held his hands around it until she was sure he had it.
"How bad are they?" she said quietly.
"Bad enough. I see your shape. I see your earrings when the light hits them." He turned his face toward her. "I can't see your face, Starla. I'm sorry. I'd have liked to."
"Since when?"
"Since about February it's been serious."
"And you drove here."
"Last day," Arvel said. "Dr. Sandhu gave me till the first."
She sat down, not behind the desk but in the chair beside him, the one for the customer's wife, and pulled it close. Through the glass, on the floor below, she could see her salespeople pretending not to look. She did not care.
She had been twenty-nine years old the first time she sat down beside Arvel Johnson, in a windowless room in the basement of the public library with a humming fluorescent light and a poster about the Dewey Decimal System on the wall. It was February of 2007. She had a five-year-old son, and an ex-husband in Bowling Green who sent money when he remembered, and a job in the detail bay at Quimby Ford, where she had worked for four years scrubbing other people's vomit out of other people's carpets and buffing the swirl marks out of their hoods. She was good at it. She was good at everything in the detail bay. She was so good that the customers waiting for their cars began to wander back there to ask her things, because she