"It's going to start."
"I know. I'm saying, you want me to wait."
Alton looked at the car seat in the mirror. Ramiro's daughter played flag football on Friday nights in a league at the rec center, and the game was at six, and Ramiro had already missed two this season for Alton's jobs.
"Go watch your girl," he said. "I'll see you Monday."
Ramiro pulled into the gravel of Phan Mobility & Pre-Owned, and Alton got out with the accordion folder under his arm, and Ramiro leaned across the seat and said, "Hey. Alton." And then could not think of the rest of it, and only knocked twice on the outside of the door and drove away.
The van was parked in front of the office, facing the street, washed. Somebody had dressed the tires so they shone. It was a plain silver minivan, the most ordinary vehicle in America, and Alton stood in the gravel and looked at it for a long time. If you knew what you were looking at, you saw that it rode low, the rocker panels a few inches nearer the ground than on a stock Sienna. You saw the small blue wheelchair decal on the rear quarter glass, and, if you looked under the passenger-side sliding door, the edge of a long aluminum plate set flush into the floor like a trapdoor.
Thuy Phan came out of the office with a manila folder and a tablet in a rubber case and stood next to him, and for a while neither of them said anything.
"Well," she said finally.
"Well."
"Come inside. Let's do the paper before you fall in love with it any more."
Her office was one room with a window unit air conditioner rattling in the wall and two desks, one of which had nothing on it but a dead fern and a computer monitor turned to face the wall. There was a framed dealer license on the wall from the Georgia Board of Used Motor Vehicle Dealers, and next to it a framed dollar bill. A shelf behind her desk held three-ring binders labeled by year, and on top of the binders, a small brass Buddha with a cluster of plastic grapes in a dish in front of it and a single stick of incense that had burned down to the stem.