In the second week of September she had called him while he was on a roof and said, "I found it."
It was a 2017 Toyota Sienna, silver, with a BraunAbility side-entry conversion and an in-floor power ramp, seventy-one thousand miles, one owner, a retired schoolteacher in Valdosta who had used it for her husband until he went into a nursing home. Thuy had seen it on the run list at the auction in Atlanta and driven up at five in the morning and stood in the lane in the rain and bought it herself, for less than it was worth, because nobody else in the lane that morning knew what it was worth. She had paid a mobility technician in Macon to go through the ramp and the kneel system and replace the ramp motor brushes and the door actuator. She'd had the transmission serviced and put new tires on it. She had sent Alton pictures. He had not shown them to Quincy, not yet, not until it was real.
The price was thirty-one thousand six hundred. With his deposits and the boat money and the Fridays, he had nineteen thousand five hundred sitting in her deposit account with his name on the ledger. The rest, fourteen thousand six hundred and forty-five dollars once the doc fee and the state's title tax and the tag were added in, he had borrowed against his retirement at the credit union two days ago, from a woman named Mrs. Ingram who had made him sign the hardship acknowledgment three times and asked him, gently, if he understood what he was doing to himself at fifty-nine. He had said he understood. The cashier's check was in the same inside pocket as the envelope, folded once.
At four-fifteen they knocked off the split-level, with the north face dried in and the south face half laid, and Alton sent the kid home and told Ramiro to go clean up, and he drove to the house on Tanyard Road and parked the F-250 under the carport and sat in it a minute with the engine ticking before he went in.
Quincy was at the kitchen table with his laptop on a mount Alton had built out of a television bracket, wearing a headset, talking to the screen in the flat, precise voice he used for the dictation software. The aide, Mrs. Toliver, was at the sink rinsing the blender. Quincy did not look up.
"Comma," Quincy told the laptop. "Henley County uses CAD version nine point four, period. New paragraph." He glanced at his father then. "They sent me a training manual. Two hundred and eleven pages. Due Monday. They said read it before Monday. They didn't say it was two hundred and eleven pages."
"You'll read it."
"I'll read it. I'm on page forty. Did you know there are nineteen codes for a traffic stop?"
"I did not know that."
"Nineteen." He looked at his father longer. "You're home early."
"I've got to run an errand. Ramiro's carrying me."