He was standing near the showroom doors in his good quarter-zip with the Quimby Ford logo on the chest, holding a coffee he had not drunk, running the numbers again in his head, when the truck pulled into the lot.
He heard it before he saw it. It was hard not to. It was an old Chevy S-10, the square kind, faded red going to pink, with a dent in the front fender that somebody had beaten mostly out with a hammer. It came off Frederica at a speed so slow that a car behind it had to brake, and then it crossed the customer lot at the speed of a man walking, and it did not take any of the open spaces near the doors. It went all the way to the end of the row and parked crooked across two spots, and then it sat there with its engine running for a long moment, as if it were thinking about leaving, before it shuddered and went quiet.
An old man got out. He was tall and slightly stooped, in gray work pants and a pair of black lace-up shoes and a brown jacket that even from forty yards away Kade could see was older than he was. He stood beside the truck with one hand on the bed rail, looking at the showroom. Not at the cars. At the building. Then he started across the lot.
Kade watched him come. He had been trained, in his first week, by a man from a consulting company in Nashville who did a two-day seminar for Ford stores in the region, and the man had said that every person who walks onto your lot is a buyer until they prove otherwise. Kade had written that down. He had written it down in his phone, because writing on paper in front of people was a thing he avoided. Every person is a buyer. He believed it in theory.
But the man from Nashville had never sold cars in Owensboro on the last day of the month with ten units and a red circle next to his name.
The old man came in through the double doors and stopped just inside to let his eyes adjust, the way old people did, blinking at the bright white floor and the bright white light. Then he did a strange thing. Instead of looking at the cars, which were arranged across the showroom floor at careful angles under the lights like jewelry in a case, he looked up, toward the sales tower, and stood there a moment with his head tipped back, squinting at the glass. Then he looked away and