"I can't," he said.
"Can't what?"
"Sit in a library with a bunch of old ladies sounding out cat. I can't. I've got a job. I've got my brother. I've got to sell two cars today or I'm washing them in the rain."
"Then sell me one," Arvel said, and put the cards back in his pocket. "And we'll see about the rest."
The deal took two hours, which Gert said afterward was the slowest and most beautiful thing she had ever watched happen in that tower.
Arvel would not take employee pricing. Starla offered it twice, and the second time he set his cup down and said, "Give me the price you'd give a stranger who was polite to you," and Starla said, "Mr. Johnson, a polite stranger gets the internet price, the hybrid rebate, the loyalty cash for the Chevy, and whatever I feel like," and he said, "Well, that's what I'm asking for, then," and she laughed so hard she had to put her head down on the desk. They took the S-10 in trade. It was worth, by Dwain's honest appraisal, four hundred dollars and a prayer. Starla gave him fifteen hundred and told him it was for the post office tag on the key ring, which she said she was going to hang in the tower, and which he would not give her.
Kade wrote the deal up.
He did it at Starla's desk, not his own, with Starla in the chair beside him. She did not take the pen. She did not watch over his shoulder. She sat with the window sticker in her lap and a ruler, an ordinary wooden school ruler she had dug out of her bottom drawer, and when he came to the VIN she laid the ruler under the seventeen characters on the sticker and moved it along one character at a time and said them aloud, in groups of three, the way you would read out a phone number. He wrote them down in groups of three. Then she turned the buyer's order around and did the same thing with what he had written, and he checked it against the sticker himself, with the ruler, his finger under each one.
"That's how I do it," she said quietly. "Every deal. Still. Nobody's ever asked me why I keep a ruler."
He did not look at her. He nodded at the paper.
Then came the part Arvel had been waiting for. Tavis brought the final contract up from finance, eleven pages stapled at the corner, and set it on the desk, and Arvel said, "Starla. Would you read me that?"