knew what every car on the lot would do and what it wouldn't, she knew which trucks had the bad transmissions and which sedans would rust at the rocker panels, she knew it the way some people know songs, by ear, from listening, from paying attention to every word the mechanics said. And one afternoon a man waiting on an oil change had asked her so many questions about a Freestyle on the front row that she had walked him out to it with a rag still in her back pocket, and an hour later he had bought it, from Dwain, who did not know the first thing about a Freestyle, and Dwain had gotten the commission.
Old Mr. Quimby had seen that. He had been eighty years old and still came in every day, and he had called her into this same office, though it had different carpet then, and told her he wanted her on the floor.
"You'll need to write up your own deals," he had said. "Buyer's orders, credit apps, the state paperwork. I can't have somebody on my floor who can't fill out a buyer's order. You can do that, can't you?"
And she had said, "Yes, sir," because she had been saying yes, sir, to that question in one form or another since the third grade.
She could not do that. She could read her name. She could read STOP and EXIT and the names of most of the cars, and a few hundred other words that she knew by their shapes the way you know a person's walk from a block away. She could not read a paragraph. She could not read the note her son's kindergarten teacher sent home in his backpack every Friday. She had gotten through twelve years of school in Daviess County by being quiet and polite and good at copying, by sitting next to smart girls, by forgetting her glasses, which she did not need, by having terrible handwriting, which was a lie she told so often it had become true. She had a hundred tricks. She had tricks for her tricks. And she had sat in Mr. Quimby's office and said yes, sir, and gone home and sat in her car in the parking lot of her apartment for an hour with her hands over her face.
A week later she had walked into the main library for the first time since a field trip in middle school and stood at the information desk for five minutes before she could say it. The librarian had not blinked. She had written a phone number on a slip of paper, and then, seeing Starla's face, had picked up the phone and dialed it herself.