FOUR

THE NEXT MORNING, I TOOK SYD’S TINY MUSIC SHUFFLER with me on the way to work, plugging it into the car’s auxiliary jack. When I was little, and my father was away on business, like when he made his annual trek to Detroit to see the new models before anyone else got to see them, I would wrap myself in one of his coats when I went to bed.

Today, I would surround myself with my daughter’s music.

The gadget was set to play tunes in a totally random order, so first I heard Amy Winehouse, then the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” one of my favorites (who knew Syd liked this?), followed by a piece by one of those two Davids who faced off at the end of a recent season of American Idol. I hadn’t quite gotten to the end of it when I pulled into the parking lot of the donut shop.

I arrived at the dealership with two boxes, a dozen donuts in each. I went into the service bay, where the mechanics were already at work on several different Honda models. It had been a while since I’d left donuts for the guys-and two gals, who worked in Parts-out here, and the gesture was overdue. You didn’t work in isolation at a car dealership. Or if you did, you were an idiot. Just because you worked in Sales didn’t mean you could ignore people in other parts of the building. Like on a Friday night at the close of business, and you couldn’t pry the plates off a trade-in to transfer them to a new car a customer was picking up, and you needed someone from Service to help you out with a bigger socket wrench. If you hadn’t made any friends in there, you might as well sit on your tiny wrench and rotate.

Most days, when my mind wasn’t preoccupied with bigger things, I loved coming in here and hanging out. The whirs and clinks of the tools used by the service technicians, as they preferred to be called, echoed together in a kind of mechanical symphony. The cars, suspended in midair on pneumatic hoists, looked somehow vulnerable, their grimy undersides exposed. Ever since I was a kid, when I would come down to the dealership where my father worked, I’d loved looking at cars from a perspective few people saw. It was like being let in on a secret.

“Donuts!” someone shouted when I set down the boxes.

The first one over was Bert, who was all smiles. “You are the best,” he said. If he had any inkling that I’d witnessed his visit to the porn shop, he didn’t let on.

He wiped his hands on the rag that had been peeking out his front pocket, then reached into the box for a cherry-filled. Then, reconsidering, he held it out to me.

“Cherry’s your favorite, right?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all yours.”

“You’re sure?” he asked, the filling oozing out the side of the donut and over his fingers.

“Positive,” I said. I took a double chocolate to make the point.

“How you doin’?” he asked.

I smiled. “Okay,” I said. I figured he was referring to Syd. It was a topic few around the building wanted to address directly with me. I was the guy with the missing kid. It was like having a disease. People tended to steer clear; they didn’t know what to say.

When Syd had worked here last summer, she’d spent a lot of time with Bert and everyone else out here, and they’d all come to love her. She was the dealership gofer, doing anything and everything she was asked. Cleaning and polishing vehicles, changing license plates, doing coffee runs, restocking parts in the right bins, jockeying cars in the lot. She’d barely had her driver’s license, and wasn’t insured to take any of the cars in stock out on the road, but she moved them around the property like nobody’s business. She could practically back up an Odyssey van blindfolded, mastered the stick in an S2000. That was the thing about Syd. You only had to show her once how to do something.

Some other mechanics wandered over, grabbed a donut, mumbled some thanks, gave me a friendly punch in the arm, returned to work. Barb from the parts department, fiftyish, married four times, rumored to have given a tumble to half the guys out here, came out of her office and said, “There better be a chocolate one left in there.”

I held one out to her.

“No fucking coffee?” she said.

“Bite me,” I said.

“Where?” she asked, her eyes doing a little dance.

I went into the showroom and dropped into the chair behind my desk. My message light was flashing. I dialed immediately into my voice mail, but all I had was a call from someone wondering how much his 2001 Accord (“V6, spoiler, mags, metallic paint, really mint, you know, except I have a dog, and there are some urine stains on the upholstery”) might be worth.

Another message: “Hey, Tim, I called yesterday, didn’t leave a message, thought I’d try you today. Look, I know you’re going through a lot right now, what with Sydney running away and everything, but I’d really like to be there for you, you know? Is it something I did? Did I do something wrong? Because I thought we had something pretty good going. If I said something that made you angry, I wish you’d just tell me what it was and we could talk it out and whatever I did I won’t do it again. We were having some real fun, don’t you think? I’d really like to see you again. I could make you some dinner, maybe pick something up, bring it over. And listen, they had a sale the other day? At Victoria’s Secret? Picked up a couple things, you know? So give me a call if you get a chance. Or I can try you at home tonight. So, gotta go.”

Kate.

I fired up my computer and went to the website about Sydney. No emails, and judging by the counter that recorded visits to the site, no one had dropped by recently. My guess was the last person who’d been to the site was me, shortly after I’d gotten up that morning.

Maybe it was time to put another call in to Kip Jennings.

“Hey, Tim,” said a voice from the other side of my semi-cubicle wall.

It was Andy Hertz, our sales baby. He was only twenty-three, and had been with us a year. That was the thing about selling cars. You didn’t necessarily need a lot of education. If you could sell, you could sell. And the thing you had to remember was that you weren’t selling cars, you were selling yourself. Andy, good-looking in his smartly tailored clothes and brush cut, and undeniably charming, had no problem in that area, particularly with older women, who looked at him like he was their own son or maybe some boy toy they could take home.

Like a lot of guys new to the business, Andy started out hot. Came close to the top of the board a number of times. But again, like a lot of newbies, he seemed to hit a wall several months in. The mojo was gone. At least I had an excuse for not selling any cars this July, even if Laura Cantrell seemed unimpressed that it was a pretty good one. Andy’d hit a dry spell, and it was just one of those things.

His normal cheerfulness was not in evidence when I wheeled my chair around to see him.

“Andy,” I said.

“Laura wants to see me in five,” he said.

“Any last words you’d like me to pass along to your family?”

“Tim, really, I think she’s going to carve me out a new one,” he said.

“We all hit these kinds of stretches,” I said.

“I haven’t sold a car in two weeks. I had that one guy, I was sure he was going to get the Civic, I call him up, he got a Chevy Cobalt. I mean, come on, give me a fucking break. A Cobalt?”

“Happens,” I said.

“I think she’s going to fire me. I’ve tried working my contacts, even family. I’ve already sold my mom a car, but my dad still refuses to buy Japanese. Says that’s why the country’s going into the toilet, we’re not buying from Detroit. I tell him if Detroit hadn’t been so slow to get its head out of its ass and stop making big SUVs, it would have been fine, and then he gets all pissed and tells me if I like the Japs so much maybe I should go live over there and live on sushi. I don’t know if I can pay my rent this month. I’d rather kill myself than move back in with my parents. Things keep going like this, I’ll be making sperm bank donations to get lunch money.”