The Heir Who Quit Luxury novel · Chapter 5 of 32
Chapter 5: Saturday
The line at the gate was thirty people long.
My mother was at the front in her scrubs, holding a box of donuts.
Behind her were nurses, two bus drivers and an old woman in a church hat.
They were all staring at the cars sitting on their rims.
Frankie stood beside me with her hands shaking.
"It's over," she said. "A hundred and sixty tires, and I've got two hands."
"It's not over."
"Theo, they can't even test-drive them."
I looked at the line.
I looked at the old woman in the church hat.
She was the lady with the Bonneville.
I opened the gate.
"Morning," I said. "Somebody slashed every tire on this lot last night. So here's the deal."
Thirty faces watched me.
"Today, you buy a car, the tires are on us. Brand new. Four of them. Frankie mounts them this week, and you drive it home on rubber better than the ones that came on it."
"Who's paying for the tires?" a bus driver called.
"Whoever slashed them," I said. "I'm going to find out who that was."
The old woman in the church hat laughed.
"Danny's boy," she said to my mother. "Lord, he sounds just like him."
My mother smiled at me with her eyes wet.
The woman in the church hat bought the first car.
A 2014 Impala that said "PASSENGER WINDOW STICKS. GOOD ENGINE."
She paid cash out of an envelope in her purse.
By noon we had sold seven.
Frankie wrote up the tickets on the hood of the LeSabre with a pencil behind her ear.
Every time I passed her, she said, "Seven," like she didn't believe it.
At one, Pop called me over to his chair.
He pointed his cane at his old tow truck, parked inside the fence facing the lot.
"Camera," he said. "On the dash. I never turn it off."
Frankie and I climbed into the cab.
She pulled the memory card and we watched it on her phone, heads close together.
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