"When a customer gives him a phone number," Arvel said, "does he write it down, or does he put it in his telephone? When he has to fill in a form, does he do it at his desk where you can see him, or does he take it somewhere? Does he ask other people to look things over for him? Does he say his handwriting's bad?" He tipped his head toward her. "Does he make mistakes with numbers that look alike?"
Starla Beasley sat back in her chair.
She thought of the Dunaway title. An 8 for a B. She thought of the odometer statement in June, and the stock number on the trade appraisal, and how Kade always brought his paper to Tavis in finance with the same bright joke, Check my chicken scratch, would you, buddy, and how Tavis always did. She thought of the product training modules he listened to on his phone in the empty showroom at night, standing in front of each car with his earbuds in, which she had taken for ambition. She thought of how he never once, in seven months, picked up the window sticker off the passenger seat of a trade and read the options off it to a customer, and how she had taken that for laziness. She thought of herself, at twenty-nine, in the detail bay, with a rag in her back pocket, saying yes, sir.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, no."
"He wouldn't look at the sticker," Arvel said. "I asked him to read it and he looked at me instead. He tapped the glass at the top where the big numbers are. And when he walked away, Starla, he wasn't walking toward that Tahoe. He was walking away from the window." He shrugged. "I've been looking at that walk for thirty-six years. I can't see much anymore. I can still see that."
She was quiet a long time. Below them, through the glass, Gert was walking the Burkharts around a blue Expedition, talking with her hands.
"I put him on twelve," Starla said finally. "Twelve units, clean paper, or he's off the floor. I wrote it on the board in red where everybody could see. I thought he was careless."
"You weren't wrong to want clean paper."
"I was wrong about why it wasn't clean." She pressed her fingers against her eyelids. "He's ten. He needs two today. And he just walked away from the one customer in this county who would have—" She stopped. She looked at him. "No."
"I'd like him to sell me the car."
"Mr. Johnson."
"He saw me first. That's how you do it here, isn't it? Whoever greets the customer gets the deal?"
"He didn't greet you. He sent you to the Fusions."