Epilogue: Acceptable
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 drop by the warehouse to see her dad, then track me down and steal my lunch.
She’d 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 replied with about forty laughing emojis.
The Westfield location 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 shop selling restaurant equipment. Above the door hung a sign reading PRYCE SUPPLY — WESTFIELD in blue letters.
I had six employees. One of them was Kyle. He’d asked to transfer, saying 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 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.
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 showed me in the middle of the dance floor in my grandfather’s gray funeral suit, performing the invisible bee dance. My arms were bent and swinging, my face scrunched in total concentration. Behind me, Georgia was laughing so hard she’d doubled over, hands on her knees.
Beneath 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 Marcus’s napkin that says Calm is contagious. Everyone who walks into my office asks about it.
Sheldon spotted it on his first visit. 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 said nothing more. He just patted my 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 these days, when one of my newer guys looks rattled, whether 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 at 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 across from my desk, took a cupcake from the box, and peeled off the paper 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.”
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
