There were a lot of flags. Tyler Brooks had counted them once, his first week on the job, back when he still counted things for fun. Forty-four. Tall white feather banners along the frontage road with the Cadillac crest printed on them in black and silver. A row of small triangular pennants strung on wire above the used inventory, red and white and blue, that flickered in the wind like a crowd waving. And at the corner of the lot, where Route 62 met the bypass, a single enormous American flag on an eighty-foot pole, so big that on days like this you could hear it from inside the showroom, a slow heavy whump, whump, whump like somebody beating a rug.
Tyler did not count them anymore. He had been at Ridgeline for three years and four months, and he was twenty-nine years old, and he was, according to the whiteboard on the wall