My mom, Denise, was raising my younger sister, Janelle, by herself. My dad left when I was eleven and Janelle was four. He moved to Texas with a woman he met at his gym, and the child support checks came for about two years and then stopped coming.
Mom worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. She was good at it. Everyone loved her. The patients brought her cookies at Christmas. But it didn’t pay much, and our apartment wasn’t cheap, and Janelle kept growing out of everything.
So when I got the job at Pryce Supply, I started giving Mom part of every paycheck. For groceries. For the electric bill. For whatever Janelle needed for school. Field trips, a calculator, new sneakers.
Mom hated taking it.
The first time I put cash on the kitchen counter, she pushed it back across to me.
“Brent, no. You’re nineteen. You should be saving for yourself.”
“I am saving.”
“How much?”
“Some,” I said.
She looked at me with her tired eyes.
“Brent.”
“Mom. Janelle’s shoes have a hole in them. I saw it yesterday. Take the money.”
She looked at the money for a long time. Then she picked it up and folded it and put it in the coffee can on top of the fridge, where she kept the bill money.
She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t have to. She just hugged me hard, the way she used to when I was little and had a nightmare.
I never showed up late to work.
I never called out unless I absolutely had to. Once I had a fever of a hundred and two, and Sheldon sent me home himself.
If Sheldon asked me to stay an extra hour, I stayed. If a delivery driver called in sick, I drove the route. If somebody needed to sweep the warehouse floor at the end of the day, I picked up the broom before anyone asked.
I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I just knew what that paycheck meant to my family, and I didn’t want to give anybody a reason to take it away.
Within a year, I’d become the guy Sheldon trusted with everything. Deliveries, inventory counts, closing up at night. He gave me a key to the building after four months. He gave me the alarm code after six.
“Don’t tell Kyle I gave you this,” he said, handing me the little card with the code written on it.
Kyle had worked there for three years. He still didn’t have a key.
Sheldon was a decent boss.
He was in his fifties, tall and a little 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 everybody’s kids’ names. When Rosa from the front office had her baby, he paid for a cleaning service for her house for a whole month.
But he had strange habits.
He loved asking questions.
He’d come up behind me 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 about it. Then I’d answer as best I could.
Sheldon would nod slowly, like he was grading an exam in his head. Sometimes he’d ask a follow-up question. Why would you do it that way? What if the customer got angry? What if the employee quit?
Then he’d walk away, eating sunflower seeds, without telling me whether I’d gotten it right.
I assumed he was just obsessed with running the business well. Or bored. Or both.
There was one day I remember especially.
It was a Tuesday in March, about two months before prom. A man named Mr. Castellano came storming into the warehouse at ten in the morning. He owned an Italian restaurant downtown called Castellano’s. Good lasagna. Terrible temper.
He was holding a box of takeout containers. He slammed it down on the front counter so hard the lid popped 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. He took one look at Mr. Castellano’s face and disappeared into the back.
So it was me.
I looked at the box. He was right. They were the wrong size. I pulled up his order on the computer. He’d ordered the thirty-two ounce. Somebody on our end, probably Kyle, had grabbed the wrong pallet.
Mr. Castellano was still yelling. Something about how he’d been a loyal customer for eleven years, and how this was the last straw, and how he was going to switch to the big company in Columbus.
I let him finish.
Then I said, “You’re right, Mr. Castellano. That’s our mistake. I’m sorry.”
He stopped yelling. I think he’d been expecting 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 stared at me.
“Eleven?”
“Eleven,” I said. “Maybe ten forty-five, if the lights are good.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he grunted.
“Fine,” he said. “Eleven.”
I had them at his back door by ten-fifty. He was standing in the kitchen in his apron, and when he saw me carrying 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.
When I got back to the warehouse, Sheldon was standing in the doorway of his office, 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 thought about 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 looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly and went back into his office.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
