He told her. She asked what kind of chair, and how much it weighed, and how tall Quincy sat in it from the floor to the top of his head, and whether he could manage a manual lockdown or would need the automatic kind that grabbed the chair by itself, and whether he wanted to ride up front or in the middle, and whether he would ever drive himself, and Alton found that he was answering questions no one had ever asked him, standing in the gravel in the cold, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Then she told him the two vans on her lot were wrong for him, one too short in the door for a power chair and one a rear-entry that would put Quincy in the back, and that she did not have what he needed, and that what he needed would cost thirty thousand dollars at the bottom end, probably thirty-three, for something with fewer than ninety thousand miles that she would be willing to put her name on.
"I don't have thirty thousand dollars," he said.
"How much do you have?"
He had three thousand four hundred in a savings account at the credit union. He had a sixteen-foot bass boat with a sixty-horse Mercury on a trailer in his side yard that he had not put in the water since the May Quincy fell. He told her.
She took her glasses down off her head and put them on and looked at him over them.
"I don't do buy-here-pay-here," she said. "I don't carry paper. I'll tell you that now so you don't think I'm going to finance you at twenty-four percent and take it back in a year. But I'll do this. You give me a deposit, I'll put it in a separate account, not my operating account, a deposit account, with your name on the ledger. You add to it when you can. I watch the auctions for you. I'll know what you need when I see it, better than you will. When I find it, I'll buy it, and I'll hold it, and when your account plus whatever you can borrow covers it, it's yours. If you change your mind, any time, you get every dollar back. I'll put that in writing."
"Why would you do that?"
She had seemed to consider the question honestly.
"Because the big lots up in Atlanta won't," she said, "and because I know what it's like to be told to come back when you have the money."
He had brought her the three thousand four hundred the next day, in a cashier's check, and she had given him a receipt on a carbon form and a typed letter on her letterhead that said exactly what she had said, and that he could have his money back on demand, and she had signed it, Thuy Phan, Owner, and he had kept it in the glove box of his truck ever since. In March he had sold the boat to a man from Griffin for six thousand two hundred dollars and taken her that too. And after that, every Friday, three hundred dollars, which was what he could take out of a roofer's paycheck in a year when he was the foreman and the work was steady and he was not paying for anything else except the mortgage and the lights and Quincy's supplies that Medicaid did not cover, which were more than people would believe.
Thirty-one Fridays. Most of them he had walked the money in himself after work, still in his boots, and stood at Thuy Phan's desk while she wrote the receipt, and they had talked a little, about the weather, about roofs, about the auctions. Two Fridays, in July, when a hailstorm had come through and he'd worked fourteen days straight on insurance jobs and was making better money than he had made all year, he'd brought her six hundred. One Friday, in April, he had not brought her anything, because Quincy had a pressure sore that put him in the hospital for nine days and the copays came all at once. Thuy Phan had not called him about it. The next Friday, when he came in with the three hundred, she had asked how his son was before she asked for the envelope.