"Arvel," she said. "That's new."
"It is."
"I said I didn't need new."
"I know you did."
She walked around the car once, slowly, the way people walk around a horse. She touched the side mirror. She bent and looked at her own reflection in the driver's window. Then she straightened and saw Kade standing by the back bumper in his quarter-zip, and her face changed into the face of a woman who has just remembered she has company.
"And who is this young man?"
"This is Kade," Arvel said. "He sold it to me. He's going to show you how it works."
"Oh, I couldn't keep him. It's Saturday."
"I've got time, ma'am," Kade said, and found, a little to his surprise, that he meant it.
He showed her. He sat in the passenger seat with the door open and his feet on the curb while she sat behind the wheel with her purse in her lap, and he showed her the button that started it and the dial that put it in gear, and the skinny one on the right, and he showed her the orange lights in the mirrors and made Arvel walk up beside the car so she could see them come on. She put the seat up three times and back down twice. He showed her the camera, and she looked at Locust Street behind her on the screen in color and said, "Well, isn't that something," in a voice so soft he almost missed it. Then she asked him if he would ride with her around the block, and he said yes.
His phone buzzed in his pocket as she pulled away from the curb. He knew who it was without looking. The girl from Kentucky Wesleyan's father, about the Maverick. He had texted at noon that he could come in at five to sign, if the price held. Kade had been holding onto that text all afternoon like a ticket.
Imogene braked at the stop sign at the end of Locust a little hard and then said, "Sorry, sorry," and Kade said, "No, ma'am, that was perfect, that's exactly what it's for."
The phone buzzed again.
They went around the block. Then she asked if she could go around it again, and he said of course. The second time she went a little faster, and turned on her signal without being told, and laughed when the hybrid went silent on the battery at the corner and said, "Is it dead?" and he said, "No, ma'am, it's just thinking." The third time around, she asked if they could go up to the Kroger on Parrish, just to see, and he looked at the time on the dash, which said 4:51, and he said yes.