After the Dunaways she had called him into her office and closed the door.
"I'm not going to ask you what happened," she had said. "I'm going to tell you what happens next. You're on the floor seven months. You sell cars, I'll give you that. People like you in the first ten minutes. But you don't close clean, Kade. Your paper's a mess. Everything you write down, somebody has to write down again. I can't have it." She had tapped a pen on the desk, once. "Twelve in October. Clean paper on all twelve. You do that, we talk about it in November. You don't, you go back to lot porter, and you can try the floor again in the spring if you still want it."
Lot porter was eleven dollars an hour, washing cars and moving them around in the rain. It was where he had started in March. It was not a living. It was certainly not the living his mother had been telling her sisters about, on the phone, in the kitchen in Hawesville, with her voice pitched so he could hear it from the other room. My Kade's in sales now. At the Ford place in Owensboro. They say he's a natural.
His mother had cleaned hotel rooms at the casino in Rockport for nine years, across the bridge in Indiana, thirty-five minutes each way. She had a bad shoulder and a worse back and a fifteen-year-old named Jace who could throw a baseball eighty-four miles an hour and needed eighteen hundred dollars for a travel team in the spring. Kade had promised the eighteen hundred. He had promised it in August, when he sold seven cars in a month and thought he had finally found the door everybody else seemed to walk through without looking.
So: twelve. Clean paper. Two more cars before the doors locked at seven, and Starla Beasley would go through every line of every one.
He had two customers who might come in. A man named Burkhart with a Tahoe and a wife who wanted an Expedition and a teenage son who wanted a Bronco and nobody who wanted to be the first to say yes. They had been in twice. They had said they would be back Saturday, which customers said the way people said they would pray for you. And a girl from Kentucky Wesleyan whose father was supposed to call about a Maverick. That was it. The rest was the fresh Saturday traffic that came in off Frederica and wandered around the lot in the cold with their hands in their pockets, and those you had to work for, and most of them were not buying today no matter what they said.