Kade Huckabee had been at Quimby Ford since seven-thirty, and by ten o'clock he had already decided it was going to be the best day of his life or the worst, with nothing in between.
He had ten units on the board. He needed twelve.
The board was a whiteboard on the wall of the sales tower, the raised glass office in the middle of the showroom floor where the managers sat like lifeguards. Every salesperson's name was written down the left side in green marker, and every car they sold that month was a hash mark beside it. Gert Daws, who had been selling Fords on Frederica Street since before Kade was born, had nineteen. Dwain had fifteen. The two new guys who had started in August had eight and nine. Kade had ten, and next to his name, in red marker, in the small square handwriting of the general sales manager, there was a circled number twelve.
Starla Beasley had written it there on the first of the month, in front of everybody, after the morning meeting. She had not explained it. She had not needed to. Everybody on the floor knew about the Dunaway deal.
The Dunaway deal had been a white Explorer in September, a nice deal, full gross, a retired couple from Utica who had paid cash and brought him a tin of fudge when they picked it up. Kade had filled out the buyer's order himself. He had copied the vehicle identification number off the windshield plate onto the form, seventeen characters, and somewhere in the middle of those seventeen characters he had written an 8 where there should have been a B and swapped the 5 and the 2 that came after it. Tavis in finance had not caught it. The state had. The title had come back rejected three weeks later, and the Dunaways had spent most of October driving a car they did not technically own on a temporary tag that had technically expired, and Mrs. Dunaway had been pulled over on the bypass, and Mr. Dunaway had called Mr. Quimby himself, and the fudge had stopped.
It was not the first time. That was the problem. It was the third time since April that something with Kade's handwriting on it had come back wrong. A stock number on a trade appraisal. A mileage figure on an odometer statement. Each time he had apologized, and smiled the smile that had gotten him through Hancock County High School and two years of junior college ball and three different jobs before this one, and each time somebody had fixed it, and each time Starla had looked at him a little longer before she let it go.