The Day the VFW Filled the Showroom
After that the sale came apart on its own. A couple in matching fleece came in to look at a Tahoe, saw what they saw, and went back out to their car. A man came for a trade-in appraisal, stood a minute by the door reading the jackets on the backs of the chairs, and left without his keys out of his pocket. The young salesman found a reason to be in the service bay. For an hour the only thing that moved in that showroom was the second hand on the clock over Stan’s door.
At eleven twenty, the door to the back lot opened and Bobby Bauer came in.
He was holding something against his chest with both arms, the way you carry a baby, and when he saw all those faces turned toward him he stopped as if he had walked into a wall.
“Bobby,” Stan said sharply. “Get back to the lot.”
Bobby did not move. He looked across the showroom at me. Then he walked the length of the room, past the rows of chairs and the new trucks, and set what he was carrying on the empty chair beside mine.
It was a green Stanley thermos with a dent in the side, and a strap made out of lineman’s rope.
“Mr. Kessler had me clean out the cab for the buyer,” Bobby said, low, so that I had to lean toward him. “I took that off the seat. I’ve seen you set it back there every month, Mrs. Tuttle. I had it in my locker three weeks, and every day I meant to call you. I’ve got kids and a mortgage, and I didn’t have the nerve.” He wiped his face with the back of his glove. “I’m sorry. That’s all I’ve got.”
I put my arms around that thermos. It smelled faintly of Wendell’s coffee, the way it always had, and no washing ever got that out.
“Thank you, Bobby,” I said. “I’d have asked you for it sooner, if I’d known to.”
“Bauer,” Stan said from the middle of the floor. “You’re fired.”
“No, he isn’t,” a voice said.
It was Rodney Brandt, coming out of the back hallway.
Rodney has been the general manager of Kessler Motors for twenty-nine years, a long, stooped, careful man of sixty-two with half-glasses on a cord. He had been out of town ten days in September for his daughter’s wedding in Branson, and he found out what was wrong on the Monday I walked into Stan’s office, when he went into the safe and found an empty envelope with Ryan Tuttle’s name on it.
He had a manila folder in both hands, the way Bobby had held the thermos.
“Rodney,” said Stan, his voice dropped. “Not now.”
“I gave you five days, Stan. I sat on this for five days hoping you’d put it right. That’s on me.” Rodney walked to the big oak desk, visible through the glass, and then thought better of it and laid the folder on the finance counter in the middle of the showroom instead, where everyone could see him do it. “Tell them what the buyer paid.”
The only sound was the air conditioning, and somewhere behind me one of the Auxiliary women’s pocketbook clasps, snapping shut.
Stan Kessler looked at the folder. I watched him understand that nobody was going to come out of a back room to rescue him.