Christina looked between them. Her face remained composed, but her hand had begun to tremble against the leather handle of her bag. She had come to celebrate somebody she loved, not to become the center of a public argument. The worst part was not that Croft doubted her ability to pay; it was the ease with which he had decided that her dignity depended upon it.
"Please," she said softly. "I did not ask anyone to fight for me. I simply wanted to buy a birthday present for my grandson."
"And I simply want you to take your money somewhere else," Croft answered. "If you even have enough."
For a moment the building was so quiet that Christina could hear the soft hum of the air conditioning. Outside, afternoon traffic moved along Peachtree Road beneath the green canopy of an early autumn in Atlanta. Inside, one of the city's most expensive automobile galleries had become a room in which an elderly Black American woman had to argue for the right to be treated as a person. She did not yet know that the grandson she had raised would walk through those doors before the day was over, or that a conversation intended to last fifteen minutes would change the business itself.
That morning had begun with cinnamon, burnt toast, and an argument with a shoelace. Christina lived in a narrow brick house in the West End, the kind with a porch wide enough for two rocking chairs and a front walk that had settled unevenly over fifty years. At seven fifteen she stood in the kitchen examining a photograph held to the refrigerator by a magnet shaped like a peach. It showed a little boy with missing front teeth, one shoe untied, and a sheet of notebook paper held triumphantly above his head.
On the paper was a blue sports car. The windows were too small, the wheels were too big, and the exhaust pipe looked like something from a cartoon spaceship. Above the car, written in uneven block letters, were the words WHEN I GROW UP. Christina had kept the drawing through two moves, a leaky roof, three refrigerators, and years in which holding on to anything as fragile as paper seemed like an unreasonable luxury.
"Still drawing cars in that head of yours," she murmured, touching the corner of the photograph. "Even when you're supposed to be doing something else."
William Bennett would turn thirty-five in twelve days. He had not lived in her house since college, but Christina still referred to the guest room as William's room, still kept a spare bottle of his preferred orange soda in the refrigerator when she knew he might visit, and still wondered whether he was eating properly whenever he called from a hotel in another city. He was an adult now, the founder of a growing investment and logistics company, and he sometimes arrived in a suit that cost more than the sewing machine she had used for twenty years. But when he walked through her kitchen door, he still checked the back burner for the pot of greens and called out, "Grandma, tell me you saved some cornbread."