"You always did talk too much when you were nervous," she murmured.
William laughed despite himself. "I learned it from you."
As they waited, Anna emerged carrying her canvas bag. Christina thanked her again, and William asked whether she would be willing to speak to an independent investigator if contacted. Anna agreed without hesitation, then explained that she had bought vehicles from the gallery before and had never witnessed anything so overt. Her face darkened when she added that she had also heard complaints from friends about being ignored unless they arrived in conspicuously expensive clothing.
"I thought it was ordinary arrogance," Anna admitted. "Today I saw what it looks like when that arrogance is aimed at somebody with less power in the room."
"I appreciate your honesty," William said. "We'll be asking other customers too."
"Good," Anna replied. "Ask the ones who left without buying anything. They're the people most likely to tell you something your sales reports won't."
Christina watched her go. The suggestion seemed sensible in a way that made her sad; people who walked out quietly rarely appeared in anybody's numbers, and the stories nobody counted were often the ones most worth hearing. She took William's arm as her SUV pulled up and let him help her into the passenger seat. He would drive her home and return in a taxi later for his own car, he said, because she looked too exhausted to fight Atlanta traffic alone.
As they left the showroom behind, the blue Porsche remained under the lights, exactly where it had stood that morning. Its price had not changed, its paint had not faded, and it had no knowledge of the argument that had unfolded around it. But for the people who had been there, the car would never again be merely merchandise. It had become the center of a question the entire business would now have to answer: what kind of welcome did a person receive when nobody expected to make money from them?
The drive to the West End took forty minutes. William tried twice to ask whether Christina wanted to stop for lunch, and twice she said she wasn't hungry. He did not fill the silence with questions because he remembered another kind of drive years earlier, after his mother's funeral, when Christina had let him sit in the back seat without making him talk. Some grief was too complicated to explain while the body was still trying to believe it had happened.
At home, she set her handbag beside the kitchen table and went directly to the sink to wash her hands. The water ran longer than usual, and William stood in the doorway watching her shoulders. He knew she was not washing away anything visible. She was trying to recover the ordinary rhythm of a day that had gone wrong.
"Grandma," he said, "did you really plan to buy that car for me?"
She turned off the faucet. "I didn't walk in there to look at wallpaper."