Part 1: The Favor
“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 Ridgeview High School parking lot. The engine was off. The radio was finally off too, after switching stations on its own three times during the drive. Through the windshield I could see the gym doors propped open, and colored lights and music pouring out of them.
Georgia’s hand rested on the door handle. She’d cracked her door open, but she hadn’t climbed out.
“What does that mean?” I said.
She looked toward the gym, then back at me.
“Brent,” she said, “my dad’s been watching you for months.”
My stomach clenched.
“Watching me do what?”
“How you handle problems. How you treat people. Whether you lose your temper.”
I frowned. Sweat was starting to gather 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 she meant, her phone buzzed in her lap.
She looked at the screen and groaned.
“It’s Dad.”
She turned the phone toward me so I could read 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 let her head fall back against the seat.
“Something my father thinks is brilliant,” she said.
I’d gone to work for Sheldon Pryce when I was nineteen.
His business, Pryce Supply, ran out of a big gray warehouse near the interstate, wedged between a tire shop and a church that used to be a bowling alley. We stocked restaurants and grocery stores all over the county with food packaging and cleaning supplies: takeout boxes, plastic cups, deli paper, napkins, gallon jugs of degreaser, and drums of floor cleaner so heavy it took two people to roll one.
It wasn’t glamorous. Nobody grows up dreaming about restaurant napkins.
But I needed that job more than Sheldon probably knew.
My mom, Denise, was raising my younger sister, Janelle, on her own. My dad left when I was eleven and Janelle was four. He went to Texas with a woman he’d met at his gym, and the child support came for about two years before it stopped.
Mom was a receptionist at a dentist’s office, and a good one. Everybody loved her, and patients brought her cookies at Christmas. But the pay was thin, our apartment wasn’t cheap, and Janelle kept outgrowing everything.
So once I was hired at Pryce Supply, I started handing Mom part of every paycheck. It went to groceries, the electric bill, and whatever Janelle needed for school: field trips, a calculator, new sneakers.
Mom hated taking it.
The first time I set cash on the kitchen counter, she slid it right back to me.
“Brent, no. You’re nineteen. You should be saving for yourself.”
“I am saving.”
“How much?”
“Some,” I said.
She studied me with her tired eyes.
“Brent.”
“Mom. Janelle’s shoes have a hole in them. I saw it yesterday. Take the money.”
She stared at the money for a long while. Then she picked it up, folded it, and tucked it into the coffee can on top of the fridge where she kept the bill money.
She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t need to. She just hugged me tightly, the way she used to when I was little and woke up from a nightmare.
I was never late to work.
I never called out unless I truly had to. One time I had a hundred-and-two fever, and Sheldon sent me home himself.
If Sheldon wanted me to stay an extra hour, I stayed. If a delivery driver called in sick, I ran his route. If the warehouse floor needed sweeping at closing, I had the broom in my hands before anyone asked.
I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I just understood what that paycheck meant to my family, and I didn’t want to hand anyone a reason to take it away.
Within a year I was the guy Sheldon trusted with everything: deliveries, inventory counts, locking up at night. He gave me a key to the building after four months and the alarm code after six.
“Don’t tell Kyle I gave you this,” he said, passing me the little card with the code written on it.
Kyle had been there three years. He still didn’t have a key.
Sheldon was a decent boss.
He was in his fifties, tall and slightly 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 the name of every employee’s kids. When Rosa from the front office had her baby, he paid for a cleaning service at her house for an entire month.
But he had some odd habits.
He loved asking questions.
He’d sneak up 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 it over, then answer as well as I could.
Sheldon would nod slowly, as if he were grading an exam in his head. Sometimes he’d follow up. Why would you do it that way? What if the customer got angry? What if the employee quit?
Then he’d wander off, chewing sunflower seeds, without ever telling me if I’d gotten it right.
I figured he was just obsessed with running the business well. Or bored. Or both.
One day stands out in particular.
It was a Tuesday in March, about two months before prom. At ten in the morning, a man named Mr. Castellano stormed into the warehouse. He owned an Italian restaurant downtown called Castellano’s. Good lasagna. Terrible temper.
He was carrying a box of takeout containers, and he smacked it onto the front counter so hard the lid flew 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. One look at Mr. Castellano’s face and he vanished into the back.
So it fell to me.
I examined the box. He was right: wrong size. I pulled up his order on the computer. He had ordered the thirty-two ounce. Someone on our end, probably Kyle, had pulled the wrong pallet.
Mr. Castellano was still ranting. Something about eleven years of loyalty, and this being the last straw, and how he’d take his business to the big company in Columbus.
I let him run out of steam.
Then I said, “You’re right, Mr. Castellano. That’s our mistake. I’m sorry.”
He stopped yelling. I think he’d been bracing for 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 gaped at me.
“Eleven?”
“Eleven,” I said. “Maybe ten forty-five, if the lights are good.”
He looked at me a long moment and then grunted.
“Fine,” he said. “Eleven.”
I was at his back door by ten-fifty. He stood in his kitchen in his apron, and when he saw me hauling 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.
Back at the warehouse, Sheldon was leaning in his office doorway, 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 considered 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 watched me for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly and disappeared back into his office.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
Then, on a Friday afternoon in May, Sheldon called me into his office.
It was almost five and I was sweeping. He leaned out of his doorway and waved me over.
“Brent. Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
I propped the broom against a shelf and went in. His office was small and crowded: invoices in stacks, a dying plant on the windowsill, and a framed photo on the desk of a woman with dark curly hair, laughing at the camera. That was Georgia’s mom, Lauren, who died of breast cancer when Georgia was twelve. Sheldon never spoke of her, but that photo had sat on his desk every single day since I started.
Beside it was another picture: Georgia at about ten, missing two front teeth, holding up a fish nearly 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 pulled the reading glasses off his head and turned them over in his hands.
“My daughter’s prom is tomorrow,” he said.
Georgia was eighteen, a senior at Ridgeview High.
I’d seen her around the office a few times. She sometimes came by after school for a ride home, or to bring her dad lunch. She’d sit in the front office doing homework with her earbuds in. Once she’d helped Rosa re-file about three hundred invoices after the filing cabinet broke.
We’d exchanged hellos 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 set his glasses back on his head. “I want you to take her.”
I laughed. I assumed 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 laced his fingers 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 said nothing. I was trying to picture myself strolling into a high school gym in a suit, two years after I’d last walked out of mine.
“Do this for me,” Sheldon added, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”
I thought about our washing machine.
It had died three weeks earlier, grinding horribly in the middle of the spin cycle and then stopping, full of soapy water. The repairman said fixing it would cost more than a new one. Ever since, Mom had been dragging garbage bags of laundry to the laundromat on Fourth Street every Sunday and sitting there for three hours on her one day off.
I thought about Janelle’s school shoes. She was fourteen now, in eighth grade. Her sneakers had split along the side where the rubber was peeling from the canvas. She’d been wrapping them in duct tape and coloring the tape black with a marker so nobody would see.
I’d seen.
If my boss wanted to give me a little extra money for taking his daughter to prom, it would make life a bit easier for Mom and Janelle.
“Okay,” I said.
Sheldon exhaled hard and sank back in his chair.
He looked relieved.
Almost too relieved.
That night at dinner, I told Mom and Janelle.
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 shot up.
“You’re going to prom?”
“My boss’s daughter needs a date.”
Janelle set her book on the table and 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 had gone quiet. She was watching me across the table, a small line creased 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 held my gaze 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 pushed back from the table.
“Go get it,” she said. “Let me look at the sleeves.”
She stayed up until one in the morning lengthening the sleeves and the pant hems. She did it by hand at the kitchen table, reading glasses on, a cup of tea going cold beside her. I offered to help, and she told me to go to bed.
By morning, the suit was hanging on the back of my bedroom door, pressed, with sleeves of the right length. A little note was pinned to the lapel in her handwriting.
Be a gentleman. Be home by 1. Love you. — Mom
That evening I borrowed my uncle Frank’s car.
My own car, a 2006 Corolla with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it, had spent a week rattling like a bag of bolts in a dryer. I didn’t trust it to make it across town.
Uncle Frank is my mom’s older brother and lives two streets over. He owns a 1998 Buick LeSabre the color of old mustard, which he’s had since it was new and treats like family.
He gave me the keys in his driveway like he was handing over a newborn.
“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 reached Sheldon’s house at six fifty-five.
The car squeaked at every left turn, and there were eleven of them between Frank’s place and Sheldon’s. I counted. It sounded exactly like a shopping cart with a bad wheel, a high, mournful eeeeek that grew louder the sharper I turned.
I hoped Georgia wouldn’t notice.
Halfway there, the radio switched on by itself. I hadn’t touched it. It started in the middle of a Spanish-language talk show. I turned it off. Two minutes later it came back on, this time tuned to a country station playing a song about a man whose truck was the only thing that understood him.
I left it on. It felt fitting.
Sheldon lived in a nice neighborhood on the north side of town, with big trees, wide sidewalks, and houses with columns. His was a two-story brick home with black shutters and a basketball hoop above the garage.
I pulled into the driveway. The car squeaked. I cut the engine. The radio kept playing for three more seconds, finishing the country song, and then shut itself off.
Sheldon yanked open the front door before I’d even gotten out.
“Brent!” he said. “You’re early!”
“Only by five minutes, sir.”
“Excellent! Excellent!”
He had on a sweater vest, which I’d never seen him wear. A digital camera hung from a strap around his neck.
He came down the steps and looked me over from head to toe. Then, without asking, he reached out and straightened my tie.
“There,” he said. “Better.”
Oddly, 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, waving a hand. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Right then, Georgia came down the stairs.
I could see her through the open front door. She wore a long dark green dress, 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 instant she spotted me standing in her driveway, her smile disappeared.
