"Well, I'm sending myself back." Arvel picked up his coffee again. "I'm not asking you to go easy on him, Starla. I don't know if you should. That's yours to decide. But I want to buy my wife a car from a young man who can't read the window sticker, with the help of a woman who couldn't read it either, once. I think that's about right. I think it'd please me."
Kade came up the three steps into the tower five minutes later because Starla had sent Gert to get him, and Gert had said only, "She wants you," and then, under her breath, as he went past, "Hush and listen."
He stood just inside the door. He had left the Burkharts with Gert. He knew what that meant. Whatever the Burkharts bought today, if they bought anything, would go on the board next to Gert's name.
"Kade," Starla said, "this is Mr. Arvel Johnson. He's a friend of mine. A very old friend. He'd like to buy the silver Escape Hybrid on the floor, and he'd like you to sell it to him."
Kade looked at the old man. The old man looked, approximately, back.
"Sir," Kade said. His voice came out rough. "I'm sorry about before. I didn't—I was out of line."
"You were in a hurry."
"That's not an excuse."
"No," Arvel agreed. "But it's a reason. Let's go drive the car."
Kade drove. Arvel did not even pretend he would. He folded himself into the passenger seat of the silver Escape with his knees up and his hands on them, and Kade pulled it out through the big glass doors at the side of the showroom, which the porter rolled up for them, and onto Frederica Street in the cold sun, and for the first half mile neither of them said anything at all.
Then Arvel said, "Tell me what it does."
So Kade told him. He did not need the sticker for that. He told him about the hybrid system and how it would run on the battery at low speeds in town, so quiet you would think it had stalled, and how she should not be scared of that. He told him about the blind spot lights in the side mirrors and how they would glow orange when somebody was beside her. He told him about the automatic braking, and the lane keeping that would nudge the wheel if she drifted, and the big screen on the dash that showed what was behind her in color when she put it in reverse, with lines on it that bent when she turned the wheel, so that parallel parking would be a matter of following the lines.