“Oh,” said Lorna, putting something she’d been holding in her hand onto my desk. It was a set of car keys. “When we were sitting in that Civic over there”—she pointed across the showroom—“I noticed someone had left these in the cup holder.”
She did this every time she came. She’d get in a car, discover the keys, scoop them up and deliver them to me. I’d given up explaining to her it was a fire safety thing, that we left the keys in the showroom cars so that if there was a fire, we could get them out in a hurry, time permitting.
“How thoughtful,” I said. “I’ll put these away someplace safe.”
“You wouldn’t want anyone driving a car right out of the showroom, now would you?” She laughed.
Dell looked as though he’d be happy if the huge Odyssey minivan in the center of the floor ran him over.
“Well, we might be back,” Lorna said.
“I’ve no doubt,” I said. I wasn’t in a hurry to deal with her again, so I said, “Just to be sure, you might want to check out the Mitsubishi dealer. And have you seen the new Saturns?”
“No,” Lorna said, suddenly alarmed that she might have overlooked something. “That first one—what was it?”
“Mitsubishi.”
Dell was giving me dagger eyes. I didn’t care. Let Lorna torment some other salespeople for a while. Under normal conditions, I’d have tolerated her indecision. But I hadn’t been myself since Syd went missing.
A few seconds after they’d left the showroom, my desk phone trilled. No reason to get excited. It was an inside line.
I picked up. “Tim here.”
“Got a second?”
“Sure,” I said, and replaced the receiver.
I walked over to the other side of the showroom, winding my way through a display that included a Civic, the Odyssey, a Pilot, and a boxy green Element with the suicide rear doors.
I’d been summoned to the office of Laura Cantrell, sales manager. Mid-forties with the body of a twenty-five-year-old, twice married, single for four years, brown hair, white teeth, very red lips. She drove a silver S2000, the limited-production two-seater Honda sports car that we sold, maybe, a dozen of a year.
“Hey, Tim, sit down,” she said, not getting up from behind her desk. Since she had an actual office, and not a cubicle like the lowly sales staff, I was able to close her door as she’d asked.
I sat down without saying anything. I wasn’t much into small talk these days.
“So how’s it going?” Laura asked.
I nodded. “Okay.”
She nodded her head in the direction of the parking lot, where Lorna and Dell were at this moment getting into their eight-year-old Buick. “Still can’t make up their minds?”
“No,” I said. “You know the story about the donkey standing between two bales of hay that starves because he can’t decide which one to eat first?”
Laura wasn’t interested in fables. “We have a good product. Why can’t you close this one?”
“They’ll be back,” I said resignedly.
Laura leaned back in her swivel chair, folded her arms below her breasts. “So, Tim, any news?”
I knew she was asking about Syd. “No,” I said.
She shook her head sympathetically. “God, it must be rough.”
“It’s hard,” I said.
“Did I ever tell you I was a runaway myself once?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I was sixteen, and my parents were ragging on me about everything. School, my boyfriends, staying out late, you name it, they had a list. So I thought, screw it, I’m outta here, and I took off with this boy named Martin, hitched around the country, saw America, you know?”
“Your parents must have been worried sick.”
Laura Cantrell offered up a “who cares” shrug.
“The point is,” she said, “I was fine. I just needed to find out who I was. Get out from under their thumb. Be my own self. Fly solo, you know? At the end of the day, that’s what matters. Independence.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look,” she said, leaning forward now, resting her elbows on the desk. I got a whiff of perfume. Expensive, I bet. “Everyone around here is pulling for you. We really are. We can’t imagine what it’s like, going through what you’re going through. Unimaginable. We all want Cindy to come home today.”
“Sydney,” I said.
“But the thing is, you have to go on, right? You can’t worry about what you don’t know. Chances are, your daughter’s fine. Safe and sound. If you’re lucky, she’s taken along a boyfriend like I did. I know that might not be what you want to hear, but the fact is, if she’s got a young man with her, already she’s a hell of a lot safer. And don’t even worry about the sex thing. Girls today, they’re much savvier about that stuff. They know the score, they know everything about birth control. A hell of a lot more than we did in our day. Well, I was pretty knowledgeable, but most of them, they didn’t have a clue.”