The lobby of Bennett Automotive Group went quiet when Evan Carter stepped through its glass doors. The silence was not complete, and it was not the sort that follows the arrival of an important person.
A telephone kept ringing behind the reception desk, the elevator continued its soft electronic chime, and somewhere above the polished marble floor a hidden ventilation system whispered cold air.
But the conversation between two visitors near the coffee station died halfway through a sentence, and the receptionist looked at Evan as though he had taken a wrong turn into a place that belonged to somebody else.
He stood just inside the entrance, holding a dented black toolbox in one hand and a paper folder beneath the other arm. His canvas jacket had faded from brown to an uncertain gray, and the leather at the toes of his boots had been worn smooth by years of kneeling beside machinery. There was a thin mark of grease near his wrist that he had tried to scrub away in the bathroom of a gas station twenty miles back. He noticed the mark, then the spotless white floor beneath his feet, and wished briefly that he had owned another pair of shoes.
He had not come to impress anyone. He had come because the electricity company expected payment, because his landlord had taped a warning to his apartment door, and because his six-year-old daughter was waiting for him to explain whether she could still go on her school field trip. He had twenty-three dollars in his checking account, forty miles of fuel left in his aging pickup, and one clean copy of a resume that had already been rejected by three other employers. The job posting on Bennett Automotive's website had promised a practical test for qualified applicants. Practical tests were the one kind of interview he knew how to survive.
The receptionist sat behind a black desk large enough to resemble a conference table. She was a neat young woman with a headset, pale pink fingernails, and a nameplate that read MELISSA. She looked down at his toolbox, then at the jacket, and finally at the letterhead visible inside his folder. Her eyes did not reach his face until he spoke.
"Good morning," Evan said. "I'm here about the mechanic position. Prototype service division."
"The maintenance garage is downstairs," she replied.
"I know where the garage is. I'm applying for work in it."
Melissa glanced at her computer. "Do you have an appointment?"
"Not a scheduled one. I submitted my application online on Monday. I was hoping somebody might have five minutes to speak with me."
The receptionist straightened a stack of visitor passes that did not need straightening. "If you've applied online, someone will contact you when they're interested. That's how the process works."
Evan could have told her that he had spent twenty minutes trying to reach the hiring office, that the automated line had redirected him three times, and that the application portal kept marking his work history incomplete because two shops he had worked for had closed during the recession. None of those details would change the expression on her face. Instead, he opened his folder and placed the resume on the counter, keeping his voice level.