"If you could choose any car here, what would you pick?" Margaret asked.
He looked through the side window toward the expensive displays. "Honestly? Not one of those. I'd want something older and honest. Something Grandma could get into without a fuss, and Mom could ride in to treatment when the buses aren't running right."
"A good reason to choose a vehicle."
"I've been saving for a used one," he admitted. "Every time I get close, something happens. Mom's medicine costs more, or the bus pass changes, or the boiler in the apartment quits. I'll get there."
Hank stood to check a call on his radio. Margaret watched him walk away and turned back to Tyler. "Do you resent it? Working so hard while other people start further ahead?"
He considered the question instead of offering the answer he thought she wanted. "Sometimes. I get tired, and I see somebody my age drive up in a new truck that their parents bought. I feel something for a second. But I don't want what they have if it means I stop liking who I am."
Margaret looked at him for a long moment. "Your mother raised a good man."
"She says everybody is somebody's grandmother," Tyler replied. "It's hard to forget that when she's spent her whole life helping other people."
They went back inside together, partly because the temperature under the awning was climbing and partly because Margaret wanted to look at the framed first sales ticket again. Tyler was still on his unpaid break and hesitated at the side entrance. Margaret told him she would not ask him to do work during time he was not being paid. He laughed and said that walking to a wall picture did not count as an assignment.
The display hung between two elegant photographs of the original dealership. One showed Walter beside a hand-lettered sign on a gravel lot. The other showed Margaret behind a small desk with a paper ledger open in front of her. Between them, protected by glass, rested the first completed sales ticket, its typed numbers slightly faded at the edges.
Tyler read aloud from the bottom. "Sale number one. Nineteen seventy-four. Walter and Margaret Hale."
He traced a finger just above the name of the buyer without touching the frame. "Ruth Brooks. That's her."
Margaret brought her hand to her chest. The paper was more fragile than she remembered, but Walter's signature still had the same slant, and hers was beside it in the quick narrow handwriting she used before years of signing formal documents changed her signature. She felt briefly as though time had folded and she could reach through the glass into that bright first summer.
"Are you all right, ma'am?" Tyler asked.
"Just remembering someone dear."
"Grandma Ruth says the owners were good people. I hope they knew what they did for her."
"Perhaps they did," Margaret said softly. "Perhaps they remember more than you would expect."