Caleb leaned forward. "We could send an audit team. Evelyn can arrange an outside reviewer. We could also bring in mystery shoppers and ask for the sales recordings."
"We can do all of those things," Margaret said. "But I want to know what happens when a customer walks in and nobody believes she can buy anything."
Her grandson looked up sharply. "No."
"That was a very quick answer."
"Grandma, I know that look. You're already planning to go yourself. You are eighty-two years old, and Brad Keller has a reputation for treating anyone who questions him like a nuisance. Let professionals handle it."
"Professionals will be introduced to the general manager. They'll be offered coffee, a comfortable office, and every document somebody wants them to see." She took off her glasses. "Walter and I started in a lot with two folding chairs, Caleb. I want to know who gets offered a chair now."
He stared at her for several seconds, then sighed with the resignation of a grandson who had spent his entire life losing arguments to a woman who never needed to raise her voice. "At least let me wait nearby."
"Of course. I may have terrible judgment about salespeople, but I haven't completely lost my senses."
Caleb's expression softened. "You know Dad would hate this."
Margaret glanced toward a photograph on the mantel. Her son David, Caleb's father, had died seven years earlier after a short illness. He had been thoughtful and funny, and he had shared Walter's tendency to bring every lonely person in the neighborhood home for dinner. "David would worry," she said. "Then he'd bring me lunch and ask what I'd learned."
The grandfather clock in the hallway struck eleven. Margaret returned to the reports, stopping at a complaint from an older woman who had traveled by bus to look at a sedan she had saved for two years to buy. The salesperson had told her that window-shopping wasted everybody's time. She had left before anyone asked her name.
Margaret read the line twice. "Walter would have walked her to the bus stop," she murmured. "And if she still wanted to buy that car, he'd have held it until she came back."
Caleb was quiet. He remembered his grandfather mostly as an old man with grease under his nails despite owning dozens of service bays. As a child, Caleb had once asked why someone so rich still carried a little tin of hand cleaner in his coat pocket. Walter told him that the pocket stayed the same size no matter how successful a person became.
The story had begun in 1974, when Walter Hale lost his job at a larger dealership for refusing to steer a young nurse toward financing she could not afford. The manager called him unambitious. Walter called the loan dishonest. By evening he had been fired, and by the following week he and Margaret had pooled their savings, borrowed against a modest house, and leased a gravel lot beside an old service station.