PART 6

“No tricks,” I repeated.

“No tricks,” Sheldon said. “I promise.”

It was the salary range for the manager position.

It was enough to help Mom properly. Not slightly cash in the coffee can atop 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, finally in my life.

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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“If I could trust you with Georgia,” he said, “I knew I could trust you with anything.”

I examined 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 inhaled. “But if you want to know how I handle pressure, you can just watch me at work.”

“I already have,” he said.

“No more surprise tests,” he said.

“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 entirely out in the warehouse.

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 everything by Friday.

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.”

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.

“Took the boss’s daughter to prom and got a promotion,” Kyle said. “Nice move. Real smart.”

“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.”

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, a can of soda on my desk. No note. Just the soda.

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. I washed my face, called three 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.

“You called the customers before they called you,” he said. “All of them. Told them about the delay before they even noticed.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s worse to find out from your own empty shelves,” I said. “People get angrier when they think you’re hiding something.”

“Good,” he said. That was all he said. I knew Marcus, good was practically a standing ovation.

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 someone 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.

“One more question,” she said. “Why do you want this job?”

“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.”

“Even if he did it in a really weird way,” I added.

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.

“Brent,” he said. “You got it.”

“Brent? You there?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here.”

“Welcome to management,” Sheldon said. “God help you.”

“Well?” she said.

“I got it.”

She started crying. Right there in the laundromat on Fourth Street, before 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.”

“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.

“The manager thing?”

“The manager thing.”

She stared at me briefly. She said, 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 before it for ages 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.

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.

The new location in Westfield opened on the first Monday in December.

It looked unremarkable. A gray metal building in an industrial park, between a plumbing supply store and a place that sold restaurant equipment. 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 smiled 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 before the door like a guest of honor.

“That car got you this job,” Frank told me, 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 everyone 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.

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 amid 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 laughed 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.

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 before it for ages with his hands in his pockets.

“She gave you that?” he said.

“She did.”

“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” he said.

“No, sir,” I said. “Probably not.”

He laughed. 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 said nothing more. He 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. I tell him, right then, whether he got it right. 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 slowly.

“Brent,” she said, with a completely straight face. “This chair isn’t facing northwest.”

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.”