PART 5
“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.”
“He’s been thinking about something important,” she said.
“Yes, and?”
“Something involving the company.”
“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?”
“You’ll know soon,” she said.
“Your family is exhausting,” I said.
“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!”
“Come on!”
Georgia had stopped acting annoyed with me. Completely. She was holding my arm. She smiled. She kept glancing at me like we were sharing a joke.
The photographer had set up in the corner of the gym, under an arch made of silver and white balloons. A long line of couples waiting. When it was finally our turn, he waved us forward.
“Couples, stand together! Closer!”
“Put your arm around me,” she whispered.
“Another test?”
“Brent. It’s a picture.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Smile!” the photographer said.
She grinned. “Tell him I’m being difficult.”
Sheldon replied immediately. He must have been sitting there staring at his phone.
I’ve offered her a north-facing chair and a complimentary napkin.
Good thinking.
“Your father needs a vacation,” I said.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said.
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!”
I laughed so hard I bent over. Georgia laughed so hard she had to hold onto the balloon arch, and among the balloons popped.
The photographer sighed and took our picture again. Then again. Finally, 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 many pleading. When “September” finally came on, the whole gym groaned, and then everyone 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 chopping motion. “And then you kind of bounce. And then you spin.”
“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!”
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?”
“There’s something Dad hasn’t announced at work yet,” she said.
“Please don’t keep me in suspense, Georgia. I have a weak heart.”
“You’re twenty.”
“I have a weak twenty-year-old heart.”
“He’s opening another location,” she said.
“Another warehouse?”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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!”
“That doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job,” she said.
“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?’”
“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.”
The customer who refused to pay. The two employees who wanted the same day off. The supplier who delivered the wrong order.
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?”
“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.’”
“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.’”
“Wait,” I said. “What happened to your original date? Your dad said he backed out at the last minute.”
“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.”
“Everyone knew,” I said. “Everyone. Madison. Your aunt. Oliver. Except me.”
“Pretty much,” Georgia said.
“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.
Nothing happened. A click and a faint whine, and then silence. The dashboard lights flickered once and went out.
Click.
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.
“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.”
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 stepped out. 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 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.
“Is this the test?” she said.
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.
So did the radio. It came on full blast, all by itself, playing “September.”
Georgia shrieked with laughter. I stood 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 squeak.
When we pulled into the driveway, the porch light was on. Through the front window, I saw the blue glow of the TV.
“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.”
“Brent?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For tonight. For not being weird about any of it. And for the napkin.”
“Anytime,” I said.
“Your hands are covered in grease, you know.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
She laughed and got out and went up the front steps. At the door, she turned around and waved. She went inside.
I sat in the driveway briefly, listening to the engine tick. The radio was off for once.
Eeeeeek.
When I arrived 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?”
“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.
“Brent,” she said. “He wants you to manage it?”
“Maybe. Georgia said he’s thinking about it.”
“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 together.
Monday morning, Sheldon called me into his office.
He was sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses atop 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.
“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.
“Georgia told you,” he said. “Didn’t she?”
“Yep. Everything.”
“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?”
“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.
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 over the following 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 everything 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.”
CONTINUE THE NEXT PART BELOW :
