Part 3: No More Tricks
I climbed in, pushed the key into the ignition, and turned it.
Nothing. A click, a faint whine, then silence. The dashboard lights flickered once and died.
I turned the key again.
Click.
I sat there gripping the steering wheel.
It was eleven forty-two. Georgia’s curfew was midnight. Sheldon’s house was twenty minutes away. The lot was almost empty, 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 once more. 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 popped the hood and climbed out. I propped it open with the little metal rod and leaned under it in my grandfather’s funeral suit, lighting the engine with my phone flashlight.
There it was. The left battery cable, the black one, sat loose on its terminal. It had wiggled off just far enough to lose contact.
I peeled off my jacket and handed it to Georgia, who had gotten out and was standing beside me with her own phone flashlight raised.
“Hold this,” I said.
She took it.
“Is this the test?” she said.
I laughed.
I shoved the cable down onto the terminal as hard as I could, wiggled it, and pushed again. It felt snug.
“Okay,” I said. “Try it now.”
Georgia slid into the driver’s seat, holding up her long green dress with one hand, and turned the key.
The engine roared to life.
So did the radio. It blasted on 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 drove 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 to look.
“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 paused 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, got out, and climbed the front steps. At the door she turned and waved. Then she went inside.
I sat in the driveway a moment, listening to the engine tick. For once the radio was silent.
Then I backed out and turned left at the end of the driveway.
Eeeeeek.
At 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 and 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, and the new location in Westfield.
Mom put down her tea and stared at me.
“Brent,” she said. “He wants you to manage it?”
“Maybe. Georgia said he’s thinking about it.”
Mom stayed silent for a long time. Then her eyes welled up.
“Mom,” I said. “Don’t. It’s not even real yet.”
“I know,” she said. She wiped her eyes on 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.”
Down the hall, Janelle’s bedroom door creaked open and she poked her head out.
“Did you get paid?” she whispered loudly.
“Go to bed, Janelle,” Mom and I said at the same time.
On Monday morning, Sheldon called me into his office.
He sat behind his desk with his reading glasses perched on his head. The sunflower seed mug was nowhere in sight. He looked uncomfortable, like a man caught doing something embarrassing who 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 pinched 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 waited across from him until he lowered his hands.
“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.
Then he laid it all out.
The Westfield location would open in six months. It was a smaller warehouse than ours, about half the size, serving restaurants and grocery stores on the west side of the county. It needed a manager to run it day to day: scheduling, inventory, supplier management, customer accounts, hiring.
He wanted me to spend six months training under Marcus, our operations manager. Marcus was in his forties, a quiet, organized man who’d been with the company for fifteen years and 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.”
“No tricks,” I repeated.
“No tricks,” Sheldon said. “I promise.”
Then he slid another sheet 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 a third time, certain I’d misread it.
It was more than double what I made. Almost triple.
It was enough to truly help Mom. Not just a little cash in the coffee can on top of the fridge, but real help. Paying off the credit card she’d carried since Dad left. Buying Janelle new shoes before her old ones fell apart. Fixing the car, or replacing it. Starting to save for my own future, for real, for the first time in my life.
I sat staring at that paper, my eyes stinging.
But I still had something to say.
I set the paper back on the desk and made myself meet Sheldon’s eyes.
“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 and looked at the photograph on his desk, 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 at last. “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 and gazed 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 set 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.
I looked down at my hands. A little grease still clung 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 reached 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 back his head and laughed, that big booming laugh 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. In the first week, he gave me a binder three inches thick holding every procedure the company had: ordering, receiving, invoicing, returns, and safety. He told me to read all of it by Friday.
I finished by Thursday.
He handed me another one.
I shadowed him everywhere. I sat in on his calls with suppliers. I watched him build the weekly schedule, juggling fourteen employees’ availability like a puzzle. I watched him deal with 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 ate 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 on a napkin and stuck it in my wallet.
Not everyone was happy about it.
Kyle found out in the second week. He’d been at the company two years longer than me, and he thought the job should have been his.
He cornered me in the break room while I was microwaving leftover spaghetti.
“So I hear you’re the golden boy now,” he said.
I said nothing. 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, turned around, and faced 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 lose my temper.
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 attend his brother’s wedding. Marcus had always said no. Kyle had always been the one who covered.
On Monday, a can of soda was sitting 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 carrying four thousand dollars of food-safe packaging, 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, phoned three truck rental companies, found one with an available truck in the next town over, drove out there myself, and spent the afternoon moving boxes in the heat with two of our drivers.
We lost one pallet. We saved the rest.
When Marcus returned, he studied 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 onto 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. But I knew Marcus well enough to know that “good” was practically a standing ovation.
In November, I had my interview.
It took place 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 beside him. Our accountant, a serious woman named Mrs. Oduya who never smiled, sat at the end with a legal pad.
They grilled me for two hours. Real questions. 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 were questions 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 set down her pen.
“One more question,” she said. “Why do you want this job?”
I thought it over.
“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 do it.
They called me that Friday.
I was at the laundromat on Fourth Street with Mom. We’d gone together that week because her back hurt and she couldn’t haul the bags herself. We were sitting in hard plastic chairs watching our clothes spin.
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 pressed her hands over her mouth.
Then she started to cry, 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 the woman came over to ask if she was all right.
“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 at the kitchen table doing homework.
“I got it,” I said.
She looked up.
“The manager thing?”
“The manager thing.”
She stared at me a second. Then she said, very seriously, “Does this mean we can finally replace the washing machine?”
“Yes,” I said.
Janelle leaped out of her chair and threw both arms over her head.
“BEST PROM EVER!” she shouted.
We bought the washing machine that Saturday: brand new, white and shiny, with eleven settings none of us understood. The delivery guys installed it in the little closet off our kitchen.
After they left, Mom stood in front of it for a long time, running her hand across the top.
“No more laundromat,” she said quietly.
“No more laundromat,” I said.
That same afternoon, I took Janelle to the shoe store at the mall. She chose a pair of white sneakers without a single hole in them and wore them right out of the store. She carried her old duct-taped ones in the bag, and when we got home she tossed them straight into the trash.
“Goodbye forever,” she told them.
