I sighed. I looked out the window, watched the late-day surf rush against the beach. I didn’t need this grief, this pain-in-the-ass, late-day closing-time hard-case test drive. I was the manager, wasn’t I? I was running the whole show down there at South Marina Honda. I was doing the test drive only because I liked to do test drives every now and then. Keep my ear to the ground, if you know what I mean. Keep my dick in the soup. And I seen this fella, this Steve, giving Graham a cold look and heard him saying, Who do you got who’s been around a while?
That was me. I been around a while.
“Okay, so you just wanna make this right here, when you get through the light. We’ll take her around the block, and when we get back, you know what you’re gonna say?”
Steve sniffed. “What?”
Miracle of miracles! The man could speak!
“I’ll take it. You are going to sign the papers and drive home in this gently used 2010 Honda Odyssey. You mark my words.”
“We’ll see,” said Steve, lips tight, teeth clenched. Showing me he was no sucker. Showing me who was the boss in this situation. But he was wrong. I was the boss. I was always the darn boss.
Steve took the turn, kept the thing at an even forty-five, letting cars stream past us on the left.
“So you live right around here in the area, Steve?”
“No.”
“No? Oh—here—so hang a right just here, after the light. We’re going to go around the block, the long block here. There you go. So where you down from, then? Malibu? Bel Air, maybe?”
I chuckled. This was a joke. The man was not from Bel Air. Not in that bargain-bin windbreaker. Not with that haircut. Steve didn’t laugh.
“Folks come down here from all over the city looking for a deal,” I told him. “They hear about us, they hear we’re the guys that are wheeling and dealing. They hear our ad.”
“‘When you hear our deals, your ears won’t believe their eyes,’” sang out Steve suddenly, loudly, and I laughed. I slapped my knee.
“Our commercial!” I said. “You’ve heard it!”
But that was the end of it. My test driver was all done being convivial. His eyes stared straight ahead. His hands stayed at ten and two. And he had this look on his face like...well, I don’t know what to call it. Whatever he was looking at, it wasn’t Washington Boulevard. It wasn’t the world around him. He was looking at some memory, this guy, or looking at the future. I don’t know. His eyes, though, man. This guy’s darn eyes.
I mean, look, you always get cuckoo birds out there. Alone in a car with a stranger, driving around in circles, that’s just the name of the game. You get people who think a test drive is therapy; people who think it’s The Dating Game; people who think they’re in a confessional booth. One time, poor Graham had a fella who pulled over on the side of Via Marina, asking Graham to suck his ding-a-ling. I liked to rib Graham about that one. Anything for a sale, Graham, I liked to say. Anything for a sale!
“All right, Steve,” I said. “So tell me. Where are you from?”
“Indiana,” said Steve in that cold, shovel-flat voice of his. “Vincennes, Indiana.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well.” I mean, Indiana? What the hell do you say to that? “You’re a long way from home.”
Steve grunted. The more time I spent sitting next to this guy, the less comfortable I felt, and I gotta tell you, I have a very broad tolerance for strangeness. That’s how you get to be manager, you know? That’s one of the ways.
“All righty,” I said. We passed the Cheesecake Factory. We passed Killer Shrimp. “And how many kids you got?”
“Zero.”
Now, that pulled me up short. Zero kids was even weirder than Vincennes, Indiana. I have sold a lot of Odysseys over a lot of years, and every one of them was to a parent. Soccer moms and lawn-mower dads, lawn-mower dads and soccer moms. Same as with the Toyota Sienna, same as with, I don’t know, the Kia Sedona. You’re talking minivans, you’re talking young couples, you’re talking about hauling the kiddos around, volleyball practice and ballet class and all the rest of it.
“Stepkids?” I ventured, and Steve shook his head tightly, and now I did not know what to say. Was I supposed to make some kind of joke here? So what are you, then, Steve? Scout leader? Child molester? But I didn’t even try it. Not with that look on the man’s face, that faraway stare, that death grimace, whatever you want to call it.
Next thing, he blew past the right turn back onto Admiralty.
“Hey—hey, now. That was—hey!” I craned around, looked down the roomy interior of the Odyssey and out the back window, watched a string of other cars making the right. I turned to Steve. “You missed it, man. You’re gonna have to make a U-turn, just up here—”
But Steve hadn’t made any mistakes. No, sir. He stomped on the accelerator, and the V-6 roared.
“Whoa,” I said. “Hey!”
His cheeks were pale; his knuckles were tight and white; his eyes stared darkly down the road. The word came to me then, the word I had been feeling around for. The word for that look on the man’s face: purposeful.
“I did have kids, you see,” said Steve, and he careened the Odyssey across three lanes toward the entrance to the 405. Horns bleated around us. “But they’re dead. They’re all dead.”