“My dad didn’t choose you by accident. And it wasn’t for my sake.”
I stared at Georgia.
We were sitting in my uncle Frank’s car in the parking lot of Ridgeview High School. The engine was off. The radio was off too, finally, after changing stations by itself three times on the drive over. Through the windshield, I could see the gym doors propped open, with colored lights and music spilling out.
Georgia had her hand on the door handle. She’d opened her door a crack, but she hadn’t gotten out.
“What does that mean?” I said.
She glanced toward the gym. Then back at me.
“Brent,” she said, “my dad’s been watching you for months.”
My stomach tightened.
“Watching me do what?”
“How you handle problems. How you treat people. Whether you lose your temper.”
I frowned. I could feel sweat starting under the collar of my only suit.
“Wait,” I said. “Did I do something wrong? You’d tell me if I did something to make him upset, right?”
“No,” Georgia said. “That’s the problem.”
Before I could ask what that meant, her phone buzzed in her lap.
She glanced at the screen and groaned.
“It’s Dad.”
She turned the phone around so I could see the message.
Remember our agreement. Don’t make things too easy for him.
I read it twice.
“Georgia,” I said slowly, “what exactly did I agree to?”
She sighed and leaned her head back against the seat.
“Something my father thinks is brilliant,” she said.
I’d started working for Sheldon Pryce when I was nineteen.
His company was called Pryce Supply. We were in a big gray warehouse out by the interstate, between a tire shop and a church that used to be a bowling alley. We supplied restaurants and grocery stores all over the county with food packaging and cleaning products. Takeout boxes, plastic cups, deli paper, napkins, gallon jugs of degreaser, and floor cleaner in drums so heavy it took two people to roll them.
It wasn’t exciting work. Nobody grows up dreaming about restaurant napkins.
But I needed that job more than Sheldon probably realized.
My mom, Denise, was raising my younger sister, Janelle, by herself. My dad left when I was eleven and Janelle was four. He moved to Texas with a woman he met at his gym, and the child support checks came for about two years and then stopped coming.
Mom worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. She was good at it. Everyone loved her. The patients brought her cookies at Christmas. But it didn’t pay much, and our apartment wasn’t cheap, and Janelle kept growing out of everything.
So when I got the job at Pryce Supply, I started giving Mom part of every paycheck. For groceries. For the electric bill. For whatever Janelle needed for school. Field trips, a calculator, new sneakers.
Mom hated taking it.
The first time I put cash on the kitchen counter, she pushed it back across to me.
“Brent, no. You’re nineteen. You should be saving for yourself.”
“I am saving.”
“How much?”
“Some,” I said.
She looked at me with her tired eyes.
“Brent.”
“Mom. Janelle’s shoes have a hole in them. I saw it yesterday. Take the money.”
She looked at the money for a long time. Then she picked it up and folded it and put it in the coffee can on top of the fridge, where she kept the bill money.
She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t have to. She just hugged me hard, the way she used to when I was little and had a nightmare.
I never showed up late to work.
I never called out unless I absolutely had to. Once I had a fever of a hundred and two, and Sheldon sent me home himself.
If Sheldon asked me to stay an extra hour, I stayed. If a delivery driver called in sick, I drove the route. If somebody needed to sweep the warehouse floor at the end of the day, I picked up the broom before anyone asked.
I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I just knew what that paycheck meant to my family, and I didn’t want to give anybody a reason to take it away.
Within a year, I’d become the guy Sheldon trusted with everything. Deliveries, inventory counts, closing up at night. He gave me a key to the building after four months. He gave me the alarm code after six.
“Don’t tell Kyle I gave you this,” he said, handing me the little card with the code written on it.
Kyle had worked there for three years. He still didn’t have a key.
Sheldon was a decent boss.
He was in his fifties, tall and a little stooped, with reading glasses that lived on top of his head. He had a big laugh and a bad habit of eating sunflower seeds at his desk and spitting the shells into a coffee mug. He knew everybody’s kids’ names. When Rosa from the front office had her baby, he paid for a cleaning service for her house for a whole month.
But he had strange habits.
He loved asking questions.
He’d come up behind me while I was loading a truck or counting boxes, lean on a shelf, and say something like:
“Brent. Quick question. What would you do if a customer refused to pay an invoice?”
Or: “What if two employees wanted the same day off and you could only give it to one of them?”
Or: “What if a supplier delivered the wrong order and the restaurant needed it by tomorrow morning?”
I’d stop what I was doing and think about it. Then I’d answer as best I could.
Sheldon would nod slowly, like he was grading an exam in his head. Sometimes he’d ask a follow-up question. Why would you do it that way? What if the customer got angry? What if the employee quit?
Then he’d walk away, eating sunflower seeds, without telling me whether I’d gotten it right.
I assumed he was just obsessed with running the business well. Or bored. Or both.
There was one day I remember especially.
It was a Tuesday in March, about two months before prom. A man named Mr. Castellano came storming into the warehouse at ten in the morning. He owned an Italian restaurant downtown called Castellano’s. Good lasagna. Terrible temper.
He was holding a box of takeout containers. He slammed it down on the front counter so hard the lid popped open.
“These are the wrong size!” he shouted. “I ordered the thirty-two ounce! These are twenty-four! I’ve got a catering order for two hundred people tonight! Two hundred! What am I supposed to put my pasta in, my hands?”
Kyle was at the counter. He took one look at Mr. Castellano’s face and disappeared into the back.
So it was me.
I looked at the box. He was right. They were the wrong size. I pulled up his order on the computer. He’d ordered the thirty-two ounce. Somebody on our end, probably Kyle, had grabbed the wrong pallet.
Mr. Castellano was still yelling. Something about how he’d been a loyal customer for eleven years, and how this was the last straw, and how he was going to switch to the big company in Columbus.
I let him finish.
Then I said, “You’re right, Mr. Castellano. That’s our mistake. I’m sorry.”
He stopped yelling. I think he’d been expecting an argument.
“We have the thirty-two ounce in stock,” I said. “I’m going to load them into my car right now and drive them to your restaurant myself. You’ll have them by eleven. And I’ll take the wrong ones back so you don’t have to deal with them. No charge for the delivery.”
He stared at me.
“Eleven?”
“Eleven,” I said. “Maybe ten forty-five, if the lights are good.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he grunted.
“Fine,” he said. “Eleven.”
I had them at his back door by ten-fifty. He was standing in the kitchen in his apron, and when he saw me carrying in the boxes, he didn’t say thank you. But he handed me a foil tray of lasagna to take home.
“For your trouble,” he said gruffly.
When I got back to the warehouse, Sheldon was standing in the doorway of his office, eating sunflower seeds.
“Heard you had a visit from Castellano,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Heard you drove his order over yourself.”
“Yes, sir. It was our mistake. I didn’t want him losing his catering job over it.”
Sheldon spat a shell into his mug.
“Why didn’t you get Kyle to do it?” he asked. “He’s the one who pulled the wrong pallet.”
I thought about it.
“Because Mr. Castellano was standing in front of me,” I said. “Not Kyle. And he needed somebody to fix it, not somebody to blame.”
Sheldon looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly and went back into his office.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Then, one Friday afternoon in May, Sheldon called me into his office.
It was almost five. I was sweeping. He leaned out of his office door and waved me over.
“Brent. Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
I leaned the broom against a shelf and went in. His office was small and cluttered. Invoices in piles. A dying plant on the windowsill. A framed photo on the desk of a woman with dark curly hair, laughing at the camera. That was Georgia’s mom, Lauren. She died of breast cancer when Georgia was twelve. Sheldon never talked about her, but the photo had been on his desk every single day since I started.
Next to it was another photo. Georgia at about ten, missing two front teeth, holding up a fish almost as big as she was.
Sheldon sat down behind his desk. He didn’t eat any sunflower seeds. That’s how I knew something was up.
“I need a favor, Brent,” he said.
“Sure. What do you need?”
He hesitated. He took his reading glasses off his head and turned them over in his hands.
“My daughter’s prom is tomorrow,” he said.
Georgia was eighteen. She was a senior at Ridgeview High.
I’d seen her around the office a few times. She’d come by after school sometimes to get a ride home, or to drop off lunch for her dad. She’d sit in the front office doing homework with her earbuds in. Once, she’d helped Rosa re-file about three hundred invoices when the filing cabinet broke.
We’d said hi a handful of times. Maybe “nice weather” once. That was about it. We barely knew each other.
“The boy she was supposed to go with backed out,” Sheldon went on. “Last minute. And now she doesn’t have a date.” He put his glasses back on his head. “I want you to take her.”
I laughed. I thought he was joking.
He wasn’t laughing.
“Me?” I said.
“You.”
“Sir, I’m twenty. I graduated two years ago. I don’t think…”
“You’re responsible,” Sheldon said. “I trust you.” He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk. “It’s one night. You pick her up, you take her to the dance, you make sure she has a good time, you bring her home by midnight. That’s all.”
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to imagine walking into a high school gym in a suit, two years after I’d walked out of my own for the last time.
“Do this for me,” Sheldon added, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”
I thought about our washing machine.
It had broken three weeks earlier. It made a horrible grinding sound in the middle of the spin cycle and then just stopped, full of soapy water. The repairman said it would cost more to fix it than to buy a new one. So every Sunday since then, Mom had been hauling garbage bags full of clothes to the laundromat on Fourth Street and sitting there for three hours on her one day off.
I thought about Janelle’s school shoes. She was fourteen now and in eighth grade. Her sneakers had a split along the side where the rubber was coming away from the canvas. She’d been wrapping them with duct tape and coloring the tape with a black marker so nobody would notice.
I’d noticed.
If my boss wanted to give me a little extra money for taking his daughter to prom, it would make things a little easier for Mom and Janelle.
“Okay,” I said.
Sheldon let out a big breath and leaned back in his chair.
He looked relieved.
Almost too relieved.
That night, I told Mom and Janelle at dinner.
We were eating spaghetti, the cheap kind, with sauce from a jar. Janelle was reading a book under the table, which she wasn’t supposed to do.
“I’m going to prom tomorrow,” I said.
Janelle’s head snapped up.
“You’re going to prom?”
“My boss’s daughter needs a date.”
Janelle put her book down on the table. She stared at me.
“Your boss is paying you to take his daughter to prom?”
“He didn’t say paying. He said he’d make it worth my while.”
“That’s paying, Brent,” Janelle said. “That’s like… that’s like a movie. A weird movie. Is she pretty? Is she mean? Is this a prank? It sounds like a prank.”
“It’s not a prank.”
Mom was quiet. She was looking at me across the table with a little line between her eyebrows.
“Brent,” she said. “You don’t have to do this. Not for the money.”
“It’s not just for the money,” I said. “He’s my boss. He asked me for a favor. And he’s been good to me.”
Mom looked at me for a long moment.
“Do you have a suit?” she asked finally.
“I have the suit from Grandpa’s funeral.”
Mom winced.
“The gray one?”
“It still fits.”
“It does not still fit,” Janelle said. “You’ve grown like three inches since then.”
“It fits enough.”
Mom sighed and got up from the table.
“Go get it,” she said. “Let me look at the sleeves.”
She stayed up until one in the morning letting out the sleeves and the hem of the pants. She did it by hand at the kitchen table, with her reading glasses on and a cup of tea going cold beside her. I offered to help, and she told me to go to bed.
In the morning, the suit was hanging on the back of my bedroom door. It was pressed. The sleeves were the right length. There was a little note pinned to the lapel in her handwriting.
Be a gentleman. Be home by 1. Love you. — Mom
The next evening, I borrowed my uncle Frank’s car.
My own car, a 2006 Corolla with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it, had been making a noise for a week like a bag of bolts in a dryer. I didn’t trust it to get across town.
Uncle Frank is my mom’s older brother. He lives two streets over. He has a 1998 Buick LeSabre the color of old mustard, which he’s owned since it was new and treats like a member of the family.
He handed me the keys in his driveway like he was handing over a newborn baby.
“Don’t touch the radio,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It changes stations by itself.”
“Why?”
“Because it has personality,” Frank said seriously.
“Okay.”
“Also, it squeaks when you turn left.”
“Squeaks?”
“Squeaks,” Frank said. “Like a shopping cart. Don’t worry about it. It’s been doing it since 2011. It’s fine.”
“Is it safe?”
“It’s perfectly safe. It just has opinions.” He patted the hood. “Also, if it won’t start, jiggle the battery cable. The left one. It gets loose.”
“Uncle Frank…”
“It probably won’t happen,” he said.
He clapped me on the shoulder.
“Have fun, kid,” he said. “Your mother says this is weird. Is this weird?”
“It’s a little weird.”
“Weird’s good,” Frank said. “Weird makes stories.”
I drove to Sheldon’s house that evening at six-fifty-five.
The car squeaked every time I turned left. There were eleven left turns between Frank’s house and Sheldon’s. I counted. It sounded exactly like a shopping cart with a broken wheel, a high, sad eeeeek that got louder the sharper I turned.
I prayed Georgia wouldn’t notice.
The radio turned on by itself halfway there. I hadn’t touched it. It came on in the middle of a Spanish-language talk show. I turned it off. Two minutes later, it came back on, this time to a country station playing a song about a man whose truck was the only thing that understood him.
I left it on. It seemed appropriate.
Sheldon lived in a nice neighborhood on the north side of town, with big trees and wide sidewalks and houses with columns. His was a two-story brick house with black shutters and a basketball hoop over the garage.
I pulled into the driveway. The car squeaked. I turned off the engine. The radio stayed on for three more seconds, playing the end of the country song, and then shut itself off.
Sheldon opened the front door before I’d even gotten out of the car.
“Brent!” he said. “You’re early!”
“Only by five minutes, sir.”
“Excellent! Excellent!”
He was wearing a sweater vest. I’d never seen him in a sweater vest. He had a digital camera hanging around his neck on a strap.
He came down the front steps and looked me up and down. Then, without asking, he reached out and straightened my tie.
“There,” he said. “Better.”
For some reason, he seemed more nervous than I was.
“Just make sure Georgia has a good night,” he said.
“I will, sir.”
“And if anything unexpected happens,” he added, “just stay calm.”
I frowned.
“Uh,” I said, “what kind of unexpected thing?”
“Oh,” Sheldon said. He waved his hand. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Right then, Georgia came down the stairs.
I could see her through the open front door. She was wearing a long dark green dress, with her dark curly hair pinned up. She looked a lot like the woman in the photograph on Sheldon’s desk.
She looked beautiful.
But the moment she saw me standing in her driveway, her smile vanished.
Sheldon immediately started taking pictures.
“Okay! Okay! Out front! By the hydrangeas! Stand closer!”
We moved closer.
“Closer! You’re not strangers!”
We were basically strangers. We moved an inch closer.
“Brent, give her the corsage!”
I’d bought a corsage at the grocery store that afternoon on my way home from work. It was a white rose with a little green ribbon. It cost twelve dollars. I’d agonized over it for twenty minutes in the floral section.
I held it out. Georgia took it and slid it onto her wrist without looking at me.
“Smile!” Sheldon said.
I smiled.
Georgia smiled too, technically. It was the kind of smile people give at the DMV.
Sheldon took about forty pictures. He took pictures by the hydrangeas, by the front door, by the car, and then by the car again from a different angle. Georgia barely said a word the whole time. She stood there in her green dress with her arms at her sides and looked like she’d been sentenced to three hours of accounting.
“Okay, Dad,” she said finally. “I think you have enough.”
“One more! One more!”
“Dad.”
“Okay, okay.” Sheldon lowered the camera. He looked at me. “Midnight, Brent.”
“Midnight, sir.”
“Have fun, sweetheart,” he said to Georgia. He kissed her on the forehead.
She let him. Then she walked to the passenger side of Uncle Frank’s mustard-colored Buick without a word and got in.
The drive was painfully quiet.
I turned left out of the driveway. The car squeaked. Georgia glanced at me sideways. I pretended not to notice.
“So,” I said, “are you excited about prom?”
“Sure.”
“Are your friends going to be there?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Lots of kinds.”
I turned left at the stop sign. Eeeeeek.
Georgia looked at the dashboard. Then at me.
“It does that,” I said. “My uncle says it has personality.”
“Okay,” Georgia said.
She turned and looked out the window.
The radio came on by itself. A man was shouting about mattress sales. I turned it off.
Eventually, I stopped trying.
When we pulled into the Ridgeview High parking lot, it was packed. There were limousines lined up by the front doors. Kids in tuxedos and sparkly dresses were taking selfies on the steps. Somebody had rented a white Hummer.
I parked Uncle Frank’s Buick between a BMW and a pickup truck with a flag in the back.
I turned off the engine. I sat there for a second with my hands on the wheel.
“Well,” I said, forcing a smile. “I hope tonight won’t be too terrible. I guess your dad really wanted you to go to prom.”
Georgia didn’t smile back.
She opened her door, but she didn’t get out.
Instead, she turned in her seat and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Wait,” she said.
That’s when she told me her father hadn’t chosen me by accident.
And she showed me his strange message.
I stared at her phone.
Remember our agreement. Don’t make things too easy for him.
“Don’t make things too easy for him?” I read out loud.
Georgia nodded. “My dad wants me to make tonight difficult.”
“Why?”
“To see how you react.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“He suggested I complain about everything,” she said. “Make unreasonable requests. Be rude. Be a total nightmare. And then he wants me to tell him whether you lose your patience.”
I looked out the windshield toward the gym. I looked down at my grandfather’s funeral suit and the shoes I’d borrowed from my neighbor, which were half a size too small. I thought about the mustard-colored Buick with its squeaking left turns and its haunted radio.
“So,” I said slowly, “I’m wearing borrowed shoes and driving a car that sounds like a shopping cart because your father wants to test my patience?”
Georgia stared at me for a second.
Then she burst out laughing.
It was a real laugh, loud and surprised, like it had escaped from her.
“Pretty much,” she said.
“Does he know there are easier ways to annoy me?”
“Brent!”
“I’m serious. He could just ask me to reorganize the warehouse again. I did it in February. Took three weeks. He changed his mind about where the paper towels go four times.”
Georgia laughed harder. She put her hand over her mouth.
“He told me about that,” she said. “He said you didn’t complain once.”
“I complained,” I said. “Just not out loud.”
Then her expression changed.
“I told him I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “The whole difficult thing. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“Then why did you look so miserable back at your house?”
“Because my dad was standing right there taking forty pictures, and I didn’t want him to think I’d agreed to his ridiculous plan.” She shrugged. “And because I was annoyed with him. Not with you. Sorry. I should’ve said something sooner.”
“Then why are we here?” I asked.
“Because I still wanted to go to prom,” Georgia said. “It’s my senior prom. I bought this dress in February. And I thought you deserved to know what he was planning before you spent the whole night wondering why I was being horrible.”
I studied her.
“Planning for what?” I said.
Georgia hesitated.
“That’s the part I can’t explain yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to hear it from him,” she said. “It’s not my news to tell.”
I groaned and put my forehead on the steering wheel.
“Georgia,” I said, “you’re making this sound like I’m about to inherit a castle.”
She smiled. It was a real smile this time.
“No castle,” she said. “But you might be surprised.”
Inside, the gym was covered in balloons and string lights.
The theme was “A Night Under the Stars.” Somebody had hung hundreds of little silver paper stars from the ceiling on fishing line. They turned slowly in the air from the heat of the crowd. The basketball hoops were wrapped in white fabric. There was a DJ booth under one of them with colored lights that pulsed with the music.
It smelled like floor polish, hair spray, and too much cologne, which is exactly what every high school dance smells like.
I felt about a hundred years old.
Georgia grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd toward a table near the back.
“Come on. I want you to meet Madison.”
Madison was Georgia’s best friend. She was short and blond and wearing a bright red dress with sequins that caught the light every time she moved. She was sitting at the table eating a cupcake.
When she saw us, she put the cupcake down and looked me up and down.
Then she grinned.
“So,” she said. “You’re Brent.”
I blinked.
“Why does everybody say my name like that?” I asked.
Georgia rolled her eyes.
“Madison knows about Dad’s little experiment,” she said.
I stared at them both.
“Wonderful,” I said. “Does the DJ know too?”
Madison laughed.
“Not yet!” she said. “But the night is young.”
Her date was a tall, quiet boy named Theo who played on the basketball team. He shook my hand and said, “Hey, man,” and then went back to looking at his phone. I liked him immediately.
We found our seats. A waiter, actually a junior from the culinary club, put plates of chicken and green beans in front of us.
“So,” Madison said, leaning forward on her elbows. “How’s the test going so far?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody’s told me what the test is.”
“That’s part of the test,” Madison said wisely.
“Madison,” Georgia said.
“What? It probably is.”
About thirty minutes later, we were standing by the edge of the dance floor. Georgia handed me her purse.
“Hold this,” she said.
I took it. It was small and sparkly and weighed about as much as a sandwich.
Then she handed me her phone.
“And this.”
“Okay.”
Then she handed me her drink, a cup of red punch.
I stood there holding a purse, a phone, and a cup of punch. I looked at her suspiciously.
“Is this the test?” I asked.
“No,” Georgia said. “I’m tying my shoe.”
She bent down, fiddled with the strap on her high heel, and stood back up. Then she looked at my face and started laughing.
“You’re going to question everything I do tonight, aren’t you?” she said.
“Your father,” I said, “has destroyed my ability to recognize normal behavior.”
For the next hour, Georgia teased me by pretending to make ridiculous demands.
“Brent,” she said, with a completely straight face, “could you ask the DJ to play ‘Midnight Sparrow’ by The Clementines?”
“Sure. Who are The Clementines?”
“They don’t exist.”
“Then how am I supposed to…”
“That’s your problem.”
I walked to the DJ booth. I actually walked over there. The DJ was a bored-looking guy in his thirties with headphones around his neck.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you have ‘Midnight Sparrow’ by The Clementines?”
He looked at me.
“Never heard of it.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I walked back to the table.
“He’s out of stock,” I told Georgia. “He offered me a substitute. Something by Taylor Swift.”
Madison choked on her punch.
Then Georgia complained that the punch wasn’t cold enough.
I went to the drink table, filled a cup with ice, and poured the punch over it. I brought it back to her with a napkin folded into a triangle on top.
“Chilled to perfection,” I said. “And I’ve added a complimentary napkin.”
Georgia took it and sipped it.
“Hmm,” she said. “Acceptable.”
Then she requested a chair facing exactly northwest.
“Northwest?” I said.
“Exactly northwest. Not north. Not west. Northwest.”
I pulled out my phone. I opened the compass app. I turned around in a slow circle in the middle of the gym while Madison and Theo watched.
Then I looked at Georgia.
“Georgia,” I said, “I can offer you north or west. The budget doesn’t cover both.”
Madison laughed so hard she nearly dropped her cupcake. Theo actually looked up from his phone and grinned.
Georgia was laughing too. Really laughing, with her head tipped back and her eyes squeezed shut.
For the first time all evening, I relaxed.
Then a woman came over to our table.
She was in her forties, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She was wearing a black dress and a name tag that said CHAPERONE.
“Brent?” she said.
I stood up. “Yes?”
“I’m Evelyn. Georgia’s aunt. I teach chemistry here.” She held out her hand. “I’m one of the chaperones tonight.”
I shook her hand.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am.”
“So,” Evelyn said, smiling, “you’re the young man Sheldon keeps talking about.”
I glanced at Georgia. She was suddenly very interested in her green beans.
“Hopefully nothing terrible,” I said.
“Oh, no. Not at all.” Evelyn’s smile got bigger. “He says you’re excellent under pressure.”
I frowned.
“Does everyone in your family discuss my job performance?” I asked.
“Aunt Evelyn!” Georgia said, covering her face with both hands.
Evelyn laughed. She patted my shoulder.
“Have a nice night, Brent,” she said. “Don’t let my niece make you fetch the moon or anything.”
She walked away toward the punch table.
I sat back down slowly.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said.
Excellent under pressure.
Later, Georgia and I stepped outside for some air.
The night was warm and smelled like cut grass. There were a few other couples out there, sitting on the steps or standing by the flagpole. The music from the gym was muffled through the brick wall, a thumping bass line I could feel in my feet.
We stood by the bike rack.
“Okay,” I said. “Enough games.”
Georgia looked at me.
“What?”
“Your dad keeps asking me strange, unexpected questions at work,” I said. “Like, all the time. For months. Then he asks me to take you to prom. Then he wants you to test me. Your aunt apparently knows my entire employment history. Madison knows. Probably the guy who sold me the corsage at the grocery store knows.”
Georgia sighed. She leaned against the bike rack.
“He’s been thinking about something important,” she said.
“Yes, and?”
“Something involving the company.”
My stomach tightened.
“Is he selling it?!”
“No.”
“Is he closing it?!”
“No.”
“Am I getting fired?!”
“No,” Georgia said. “Brent, calm down. It’s definitely not that. I promise.”
“Then what, Georgia?”
She hesitated. She looked at me for a long moment.
“You’ll know soon,” she said.
I put my hands on my head.
“Your family is exhausting,” I said.
She laughed.
“Imagine growing up with them!”
Before I could respond, Madison burst out the gym doors in her red sequin dress.
“Georgia! Group pictures! Right now! The photographer’s leaving in ten minutes!”
Georgia grabbed my arm.
“Come on!”
As we walked back inside, I noticed something.
Georgia had stopped acting annoyed with me. Completely. She was holding my arm. She was smiling. She kept glancing at me like we were sharing a joke.
Whatever her father was planning, she seemed to be on my side.
That made me feel a little better.
Only a little.
The photographer had set up in the corner of the gym, under an arch made of silver and white balloons. There was a long line of couples waiting. When it was finally our turn, he waved us forward.
“Couples, stand together! Closer!”
Georgia moved beside me.
“Put your arm around me,” she whispered.
I hesitated.
“Another test?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Brent. It’s a picture.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. She leaned against me.
“Smile!” the photographer said.
I smiled.
My phone buzzed in my pocket a few seconds later.
I pulled it out. It was a text from Sheldon.
Everything going smoothly?
I showed Georgia.
She grinned. “Tell him I’m being difficult.”
I thought about it. Then I typed:
Georgia has requested a chair facing northwest. Negotiations are ongoing.
Sheldon replied immediately. He must have been sitting there staring at his phone.
Interesting. How are you handling it?
I stared at the response.
Georgia peeked over my shoulder and started laughing.
I typed:
I’ve offered her a north-facing chair and a complimentary napkin.
Three dots appeared. Then disappeared. Then appeared again.
Then:
Good thinking.
I shook my head.
“Your father needs a vacation,” I said.
Georgia grabbed my phone out of my hand.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said.
She typed something quickly and handed it back to me. I looked at the screen. She’d already sent it.
Georgia has also requested that I obtain the moon. Please advise.
My boss didn’t answer for two minutes.
Georgia and I stood under the balloon arch, staring at my phone, waiting. The photographer was trying to take our picture again. He kept saying, “Look up, please! Look at the camera!”
Then:
Um, well, use your judgment.
I laughed so hard I bent over. Georgia was laughing so hard she had to hold onto the balloon arch, and one of the balloons popped.
The photographer sighed and took our picture again. Then again. In the end, I think he gave up and just used one where we were both laughing with our eyes closed.
By the end of prom, Georgia and I were actually having a great time.
We danced badly. Really badly. I’m not a dancer. Georgia isn’t either, it turns out, but at least she’s confident about it.
We ate too many cupcakes. The culinary club had made about four hundred of them, chocolate with silver sprinkles, and they were stacked on a tiered tray by the drink table. Georgia ate three. I ate four. Madison ate so many we stopped counting.
We watched Madison convince the DJ to play an old disco song. It took her twenty minutes and a lot of pleading. When “September” finally came on, the whole gym groaned, and then everybody started dancing anyway.
Georgia taught me a dance move during that song.
“You put your arms like this,” she said, demonstrating. She bent her elbows and swung them back and forth in a sort of chopping motion. “And then you kind of bounce. And then you spin.”
I tried it.
Georgia stopped dancing and just stared at me.
“What?” I said, still swinging my arms.
“You look like you’re fighting invisible bees,” she said.
“That’s the move!”
“That is not the move!”
Madison was crying from laughing. Theo filmed the whole thing on his phone.
I didn’t stop doing it for the rest of the night.
The dance ended at eleven-thirty. The lights came up, the DJ played one last slow song, and the chaperones started herding everyone toward the doors.
When we finally walked out to the parking lot, Georgia was still laughing about the invisible bees.
“Okay,” I said as we reached Uncle Frank’s Buick. “I survived prom. Can you tell me what’s happening now?”
Georgia stopped smiling.
“There’s something Dad hasn’t announced at work yet,” she said.
My stomach tightened again.
“Please don’t keep me in suspense, Georgia. I have a weak heart.”
“You’re twenty.”
“I have a weak twenty-year-old heart.”
She took a breath.
“He’s opening another location,” she said.
I blinked.
“Another warehouse?”
She nodded.
“In Westfield. He signed the lease in March. It’s going to open in the fall.” She paused. “And he needs someone to manage it.”
I stared at her.
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“He’s been watching a few different employees,” Georgia said. “Seeing who might be ready. But you’re the one he’s most interested in.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
The parking lot was emptying out around us. Limousines were pulling away. Somebody honked. A group of girls ran past barefoot, carrying their high heels.
Then I managed to squeak out, “Me?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m practically new!”
“You’ve been there more than a year.”
“I still call my mom when I don’t know how long to cook chicken!”
Georgia laughed.
“That doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job,” she said.
I shook my head. I leaned back against the car.
“Why didn’t he just tell me?” I said. “Why didn’t he just call me into his office and say, ‘Hey, Brent, want to apply for this job?’”
Georgia was quiet for a moment.
“Because he’s convinced you’re too young to recognize your own potential,” she said. “He thought if he asked you straight out, you’d say no. You’d say you weren’t ready. You’d say somebody else deserved it more. Kyle, or somebody older.”
I didn’t say anything. Because that’s exactly what I would have said.
I thought about the questions Sheldon had asked me over the past year.
The customer who refused to pay. The two employees who wanted the same day off. The supplier who delivered the wrong order.
Mr. Castellano and his takeout containers.
Why didn’t you get Kyle to do it?
“Those questions he kept asking me,” I said slowly. “Those were all tests?”
“Some of them,” Georgia said. “He wanted to know how you think. How you solve problems. Whether you blame people or fix things.”
“And tonight?”
Georgia sighed.
“He thought an awkward social situation would show whether you could stay calm when someone was being unreasonable,” she said. “Like a difficult customer. Or a difficult employee. He said, and I quote, ‘If he can handle a cranky teenager for four hours without losing his temper, he can handle anybody.’”
I stared at her.
“Your father turned prom into a management interview?!”
“That was his plan,” Georgia said.
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I told him!” Georgia threw up her hands. “I told him it was ridiculous! I told him it was weird and unfair! He said it was ‘an unconventional assessment environment.’”
Then I remembered something.
“Wait,” I said. “What happened to your original date? Your dad said he backed out at the last minute.”
Georgia smiled, a little guiltily.
“Oliver’s my friend,” she said. “We were supposed to go together. Just as friends. But then Dad started talking about this whole plan two weeks ago. And he asked if Oliver would mind going with his other friends instead.”
“So Oliver didn’t exactly back out?”
“No,” Georgia said. “He’s here tonight. He was the guy in the blue tux who did the worm during ‘Uptown Funk.’”
I remembered him. He’d knocked over a chair.
“Dad just preferred the ‘backed out’ explanation,” Georgia said. “It sounded more urgent.”
I rubbed my face with both hands.
“Everyone knew,” I said. “Everyone. Madison. Your aunt. Oliver. Except me.”
“Pretty much,” Georgia said.
Then Georgia pulled out her phone.
“And I already told Dad what I think,” she said.
She turned the screen toward me. She’d sent the message twenty minutes earlier, during the last slow song.
Brent failed your test. He let me eat three cupcakes, couldn’t obtain the moon, and danced like a washing machine with a loose wheel. We had a great time. Stop treating people like experiments.
I burst out laughing.
Then I saw Sheldon’s reply underneath.
Understood. We need to talk.
Suddenly, I was nervous again.
That was when the car wouldn’t start.
I got in, put the key in, and turned it.
Nothing happened. There was a click and a faint whine, and then silence. The dashboard lights flickered once and went out.
I turned the key again.
Click.
I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel.
It was eleven forty-two. Georgia’s curfew was midnight. Sheldon’s house was twenty minutes away. The parking lot was almost empty now, just a few cars left and a janitor rolling a trash can toward the dumpster.
Georgia looked at me from the passenger seat.
“Is this the unexpected thing?” she said slowly. “Did my dad do this?”
“I don’t think your dad sabotaged my uncle’s Buick,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
I tried the key one more time. Click.
And then I remembered.
If it won’t start, jiggle the battery cable. The left one. It gets loose.
“Hang on,” I said.
I pulled the hood release. I got out of the car. I propped the hood open with the little metal rod and leaned in under it in my grandfather’s funeral suit. I used my phone flashlight.
There it was. The left battery cable, the black one, was sitting loose on the terminal. It had wiggled off just enough to lose contact.
I took off my jacket and handed it to Georgia, who’d gotten out and was standing beside me holding up her own phone flashlight.
“Hold this,” I said.
She took it.
“Is this the test?” she said.
I laughed.
I pushed the cable back down onto the terminal as hard as I could. I wiggled it. I pushed it again. It felt tight.
“Okay,” I said. “Try it now.”
Georgia got into the driver’s seat, holding up her long green dress with one hand. She turned the key.
The engine roared to life.
So did the radio. It came on full blast, all by itself, playing “September.”
Georgia shrieked with laughter. I stood there in the parking lot with grease on my hands, laughing so hard I had to lean on the fender.
I got her home at 12:04.
Four minutes late. I’d driven as fast as I legally could, squeaking around every left turn. Georgia laughed at every single squeak.
When we pulled into the driveway, the porch light was on. Through the front window, I could see the blue glow of the TV.
Georgia leaned forward and looked.
“He fell asleep,” she said. “On the couch. He always does.”
“Should I come in and tell him we’re home?”
“No,” she said. “Let him sleep. He’ll pretend he was awake the whole time anyway.”
She opened her door. Then she stopped and looked back at me.
“Brent?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For tonight. For not being weird about any of it. And for the napkin.”
“Anytime,” I said.
She smiled.
“Your hands are covered in grease, you know.”
I looked down. They were.
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
She laughed and got out and went up the front steps. At the door, she turned around and waved. Then she went inside.
I sat in the driveway for a second, listening to the engine tick. The radio was off for once.
Then I backed out. I turned left at the end of the driveway.
Eeeeeek.
When I got home, Mom was waiting up at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, with a cup of tea.
“Well?” she said.
“It was fine.”
“Just fine?”
I sat down across from her. I thought about it.
“It was actually really fun,” I said. “And really weird.”
“Weird how?”
I told her about the test. The text messages. The chair facing northwest. The moon. The new location in Westfield.
Mom put down her tea. She stared at me.
“Brent,” she said. “He wants you to manage it?”
“Maybe. Georgia said he’s thinking about it.”
Mom didn’t say anything for a long time. Then her eyes filled up.
“Mom,” I said. “Don’t. It’s not even real yet.”
“I know,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I know. I’m just… I’m proud of you. That’s all. Somebody else sees it too. What I’ve always seen.”
From the hallway, Janelle’s bedroom door creaked open. She stuck her head out.
“Did you get paid?” she whispered loudly.
“Go to bed, Janelle,” Mom and I said at the same time.
Monday morning, Sheldon called me into his office.
He was sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses on top of his head. There was no sunflower seed mug in sight. He looked uncomfortable, like a man who’d been caught doing something embarrassing and knew it.
“Sit down, Brent,” he said.
I sat.
“How was prom?” he asked. “We never really got to talk when you brought Georgia back. I was…” He cleared his throat. “Resting my eyes.”
“Educational,” I said.
Sheldon sighed. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Georgia told you,” he said. “Didn’t she?”
“Yep. Everything.”
He covered his face with both hands.
“I should’ve known she couldn’t keep a secret,” he said into his palms. “She’s never been able to keep a secret. When she was seven, she told her mother what we got her for Christmas. Before Thanksgiving.”
I sat across from him and waited until he took his hands off his face.
“Sir,” I said, “why didn’t you just ask me whether I wanted to apply for the position?”
He looked at me.
“Because I wasn’t sure you’d believe you were ready,” he said.
“Honestly,” I said, “I’m still not sure.”
“That’s why you’ll get training,” Sheldon said.
He opened a folder on his desk and turned it around so I could see it.
He explained everything.
The new location in Westfield would open in six months. It was a smaller warehouse than ours, about half the size, serving the restaurants and grocery stores on the west side of the county. It would need a manager to run it day to day. Scheduling, inventory, supplier management, customer accounts, hiring.
He wanted me to train for the next six months with Marcus, our operations manager. Marcus was in his forties, a quiet, organized man who’d been with the company for fifteen years. He knew every single thing about how the business worked.
“Marcus will teach you everything he knows,” Sheldon said. “You’ll shadow him for the first two months. Then he’ll start handing you pieces of the job. Scheduling first. Then ordering. Then the customer accounts.” He tapped the folder. “If you do well, at the end of six months, you’ll interview for the management position. A real interview. With me, Marcus, and our accountant. No tricks.”
“No tricks,” I repeated.
“No tricks,” Sheldon said. “I promise.”
Then he slid another piece of paper across the desk.
It was the salary range for the manager position.
I nearly fell out of my chair.
I read it twice. Then I read it again, because I thought I’d read it wrong.
It was more than twice what I was making. Almost three times.
It was enough to help Mom properly. Not just a little cash in the coffee can on top of the fridge, but really help. Pay off the credit card she’d been carrying since Dad left. Buy Janelle new shoes before the old ones fell apart. Fix the car, or replace it. Start saving for my own future, for real, for the first time in my life.
I sat there staring at that piece of paper. My eyes were stinging.
But I still had something to say.
I put the paper back down on the desk. I made myself look Sheldon in the eye.
“Sir,” I said, “I really appreciate this. More than I can say. But using Georgia’s prom to test me wasn’t fair. Not to me. And not to her.”
Sheldon didn’t argue. He nodded slowly.
“You’re right,” he said. “Georgia said the same thing. Several times. Loudly.”
He leaned back in his chair. He looked at the photograph on his desk, of Lauren laughing with her dark curly hair, and the one beside it of ten-year-old Georgia with her missing teeth and her giant fish.
He was quiet for a long time.
“But it was more than a test, Brent,” he said finally. “I didn’t tell my daughter this part. But I didn’t ask you to take her to prom just to see how you’d handle pressure.”
He picked up the photo of Georgia and the fish. He looked at it.
“Her mom died when she was twelve,” he said quietly. “Since then, it’s just been the two of us. I’ve been a nervous wreck about her for six years. About everything. Who she hangs out with. Who she trusts. Who’s going to take care of her when I’m not around.” He put the photo down. “I asked you to be her date because I wanted to see how you’d treat the most precious person in my life.”
He looked up at me.
“If I could trust you with Georgia,” he said, “I knew I could trust you with anything.”
I couldn’t help it. My eyes filled up.
I looked down at my hands. There was still a little grease under my thumbnail from Uncle Frank’s battery cable.
“It was an honor, sir,” I said. My voice came out rough. “Really. She’s great. We had a great time.” I took a breath. “But if you want to know how I handle pressure, you can just watch me at work.”
Sheldon smiled.
“I already have,” he said.
Then he held out his hand across the desk.
“No more surprise tests,” he said.
I shook it.
“Good,” I said. “Because I still haven’t figured out how to get Georgia the moon.”
Sheldon threw his head back and laughed, his big booming laugh that you could hear all the way out in the warehouse.
The next six months were the hardest of my life.
Marcus was a good teacher, but he didn’t go easy on me. The first week, he handed me a binder three inches thick with every procedure the company had. Ordering, receiving, invoicing, returns, and safety. He told me to read the whole thing by Friday.
I read it by Thursday.
He handed me another one.
I shadowed him everywhere. I sat in on his phone calls with suppliers. I watched him build the weekly schedule, juggling fourteen employees’ availability like a puzzle. I watched him handle customers who were angry, customers who were confused, and customers who wanted discounts they didn’t deserve.
“You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room,” Marcus told me once, while we were eating lunch in his truck. “You just have to be the calmest. People can smell panic. They can also smell calm. Calm’s contagious.”
I wrote that down on a napkin and stuck it in my wallet.
Not everybody was happy about it.
Kyle found out in the second week. He’d been at the company two years longer than me. He thought the job should’ve been his.
He came up to me in the break room while I was microwaving leftover spaghetti.
“So I hear you’re the golden boy now,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I just waited for the microwave.
“Took the boss’s daughter to prom and got a promotion,” Kyle said. “Nice move. Real smart.”
The microwave beeped. I took out my spaghetti. I turned around and looked at him.
“Kyle,” I said. “I didn’t know anything about the job until after prom. And I haven’t gotten anything yet. I’m training. If I mess up, I don’t get it.”
“Sure,” Kyle said.
“And if you want to be a manager someday,” I said, “I’ll help you. I mean it. I’ll show you everything Marcus shows me.”
Kyle stared at me. I think he was waiting for me to get angry.
I didn’t.
He shook his head and walked out of the break room.
But two months later, when I took over the weekly schedule, I gave Kyle the Saturday off he’d been asking for since spring so he could go to his brother’s wedding. Marcus had always said no. Kyle had always been the one who covered.
On Monday, there was a can of soda on my desk. No note. Just the soda.
I knew who it was from.
There were bad days too.
In August, a refrigerated truck broke down on the highway with four thousand dollars of food-safe packaging inside, on a ninety-five-degree day. Marcus was on vacation. I was in charge.
I didn’t panic. Okay, I panicked a little, in the bathroom, for about two minutes. Then I washed my face, called three different truck rental companies, found one with an available truck in the next town over, drove out there myself, and spent the afternoon transferring boxes in the heat with two of our drivers.
We lost one pallet. We saved the rest.
When Marcus got back, he looked at my incident report for a long time.
“You called the customers before they called you,” he said. “All of them. Told them about the delay before they even noticed.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I thought about Mr. Castellano slamming that box of containers on the counter.
“Because it’s worse to find out from your own empty shelves,” I said. “People get angrier when they think you’re hiding something.”
Marcus nodded slowly.
“Good,” he said. That was all he said. But I knew from Marcus, good was practically a standing ovation.
In November, I had my interview.
It was in the conference room, which was really just the break room with the coffee maker unplugged. Sheldon sat at the head of the table. Marcus sat next to him. Our accountant, a serious woman named Mrs. Oduya who never smiled, sat at the end with a legal pad.
They asked me questions for two hours. Real ones. Hard ones. How I’d handle a budget shortfall. How I’d fire somebody who was stealing. How I’d keep good employees from quitting. What I’d do in my first week. My first month. My first year.
Some of the questions were ones Sheldon had asked me before, leaning on a shelf in the warehouse with a mouthful of sunflower seeds.
This time, I knew why he was asking.
At the end, Mrs. Oduya put down her pen.
“One more question,” she said. “Why do you want this job?”
I thought about it.
“Because my mom’s been carrying everything by herself for nine years,” I said. “And I want to carry some of it. And because I’ve figured out that I’m good at this. At fixing things. At helping people figure stuff out. And I didn’t know that about myself until somebody made me find out.”
I glanced at Sheldon.
“Even if he did it in a really weird way,” I added.
Marcus snorted. Sheldon laughed.
Mrs. Oduya smiled.
It was the first time I’d ever seen her smile.
They called me that Friday.
I was at the laundromat on Fourth Street with Mom. We’d gone together that week because her back was hurting and she couldn’t carry the bags herself. We were sitting in the hard plastic chairs watching our clothes spin around.
My phone rang. It was Sheldon.
“Brent,” he said. “You got it.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“Brent? You there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here.”
“Welcome to management,” Sheldon said. “God help you.”
When I hung up, Mom was staring at me.
“Well?” she said.
“I got it.”
Mom put her hands over her mouth.
Then she started crying. Right there in the laundromat on Fourth Street, in front of a dryer full of our towels and a woman folding her husband’s work shirts. She cried so hard that the woman came over and asked if she was okay.
“My son,” Mom said, pointing at me, still crying. “My son just got a promotion.”
The woman smiled and patted her shoulder.
“Congratulations,” she said to me. “Your mom’s proud of you.”
“I know,” I said. My eyes were wet too. “I know she is.”
When we got home, Janelle was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework.
“I got it,” I said.
She looked up.
“The manager thing?”
“The manager thing.”
She stared at me for a second. Then she said, very seriously, “Does this mean we can finally replace the washing machine?”
“Yes,” I said.
Janelle jumped up out of her chair and raised both arms over her head.
“BEST PROM EVER!” she shouted.
We bought the washing machine that Saturday. A brand new one, white and shiny, with eleven different settings that none of us understood. The delivery guys installed it in the little closet off our kitchen.
Mom stood in front of it for a long time after they left. She ran her hand over the top of it.
“No more laundromat,” she said quietly.
“No more laundromat,” I said.
The same afternoon, I took Janelle to the shoe store at the mall. She picked out a pair of white sneakers without a single hole in them. She wore them out of the store. She carried her old duct-taped ones in the bag, and when we got home she threw them straight in the trash.
“Goodbye forever,” she told them.
Georgia and I stayed friends.
She started college that fall at the state university, an hour away, studying engineering. She came home some weekends. Sometimes she’d stop by the warehouse to see her dad, and she’d come find me and steal my lunch.
She texted me the night before my interview.
Good luck tomorrow. If they ask you to get the moon, tell them it’s not in the budget.
I texted back: I’ll offer them north or west.
She sent back about forty laughing emojis.
The new location in Westfield opened on the first Monday in December.
It wasn’t much to look at. A gray metal building in an industrial park, between a plumbing supply store and a place that sold restaurant equipment. There was a sign over the door that said PRYCE SUPPLY — WESTFIELD in blue letters.
I had six employees. One of them was Kyle. He’d asked to transfer. He said he wanted to learn from the “golden boy.” He was smiling when he said it.
Sheldon came for the ribbon cutting. So did Marcus, Mrs. Oduya, Mom, Janelle, and Uncle Frank, who drove the mustard-colored Buick and parked it right in front of the door like a guest of honor.
“That car got you this job,” Frank told me, very seriously. “Never forget it.”
“It almost made me late.”
“It made you calm under pressure,” Frank said. “That’s personality.”
Georgia came too.
She’d driven down from school that morning. After the ribbon cutting, while everybody was eating sheet cake in the break room, she pulled me aside and handed me a flat package wrapped in brown paper.
“Open it,” she said.
I tore off the paper.
It was a framed photograph from prom, from under the balloon arch, the one where we were both laughing with our eyes closed.
But that wasn’t the one in the frame.
The one in the frame was a different picture. Theo must have taken it on his phone. It was me in the middle of the dance floor in my grandfather’s gray funeral suit, doing the invisible bee dance. My arms were bent and swinging. My face was scrunched up in total concentration. Behind me, Georgia was laughing so hard she was bent over with her hand on her knees.
Underneath the picture, on a little white card tucked into the frame, she’d written in black marker:
Employee of the Month: Survived One Prom, Three Cupcakes, and a Very Strange Boss.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down.
I hung it in my office.
It’s still there, on the wall right behind my desk, next to the napkin from Marcus that says Calm is contagious. Every person who comes into my office asks me about it.
Sheldon saw it the first time he visited. He stood in front of it for a long time with his hands in his pockets.
“She gave you that?” he said.
“She did.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” he said.
“No, sir,” I said. “Probably not.”
He laughed. Then he looked at the photo again, at Georgia bent over laughing in her green dress.
“She hasn’t laughed like that since her mom died,” he said quietly. “Not really. Not until that night.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just patted me on the shoulder and went back out to look at the inventory.
I’ve been a manager for almost a year now.
I still call my mom when I don’t know how long to cook chicken. Some things don’t change.
But now, when one of my newer guys looks scared about something, when he’s dealing with an angry customer or a broken truck or a schedule that won’t come together, I lean on a shelf beside him and ask him a question.
“Hey. Quick question. What would you do if a supplier sent the wrong order?”
He answers. Then I tell him, right then, whether he got it right. And I tell him he’s good at this. Out loud. To his face. I don’t make him wait. I don’t make him wonder. I don’t turn anything into a test.
I learned that much from Sheldon. Mostly by watching what he did wrong.
Last month, Georgia came home for fall break. She stopped by the Westfield warehouse to drop off a box of cupcakes from her dad, chocolate with silver sprinkles.
She stood in my office doorway and looked at the framed photo on the wall.
“You kept it,” she said.
“Of course I kept it.”
She came in and sat down across from my desk. She took a cupcake out of the box. She peeled the paper off very slowly.
“Brent,” she said, with a completely straight face. “This chair isn’t facing northwest.”
I looked at her.
Then I got up, came around the desk, and turned her chair a quarter turn to the left.
“West,” I said. “Best I can do.”
“Hmm,” Georgia said. She took a bite of her cupcake. “Acceptable.”
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.