He told him about the seat that could go up and down with a button. He pulled into the lot of a closed furniture store and showed him how it parked itself, more or less, if you asked it to, and Arvel laughed out loud, a short surprised bark, and said, "Well, I'll be. She'll never believe it."
He was good at this. He knew he was good at this. He had always been good at the part that came out of his mouth.
When they were back on Frederica, headed south, Arvel said, without any change in his voice, "How long have you had trouble with reading, son?"
Kade's hands went tight on the wheel.
"I don't," he said.
"All right."
"I mean it. I read fine. I read slow, maybe. Everybody reads slow."
"All right."
They passed a Wendy's and a tire place and a church with a sign out front that Kade did not look at. He could feel the old man beside him not saying anything, the way you could feel weather.
"Who told you?" Kade said finally. "Starla?"
"Nobody told me. You did. Back there on the floor."
"I was busy. I was trying to get to a customer."
"You were trying to get away from a piece of paper," Arvel said. "I know because I've watched a lot of people do it. Grown men. Grown women. A preacher once, a Methodist, who'd been giving sermons for twenty years off of tapes his wife made him. A man who'd been a foreman at the distillery and could build you anything but couldn't read the safety signs he'd hung. A woman who sells more cars than anybody on Frederica Street." He let that sit. "Every one of them would have walked away from me the same as you did, if they could have."
Kade pulled over. He did not decide to. He just found himself steering into the turn lane and then into the empty lot of a bank that was closed on Saturdays, and putting the car in park, and sitting there with both hands on the wheel and the engine running so quietly on its battery that he could hear himself breathe.
"Does Starla know?" he said.
"Starla thinks you're careless," Arvel said. "Or she did, till about ten-thirty this morning." He turned his face toward the windshield. "The rest of what she knows is hers to tell you. Not mine."
For a long time Kade did not say anything. When he did, it came out in pieces, the way water comes out of a pipe that has not been used.