Then, one Friday afternoon in May, Sheldon called me into his office.

It was almost five. I was sweeping. He leaned out of his office door and waved me over.

“Brent. Got a minute?”

“Sure.”

I leaned the broom against a shelf and went in. His office was small and cluttered. Invoices in piles. A dying plant on the windowsill. A framed photo on the desk of a woman with dark curly hair, laughing at the camera. That was Georgia’s mom, Lauren. She died of breast cancer when Georgia was twelve. Sheldon never talked about her, but the photo had been on his desk every single day since I started.

Next to it was another photo. Georgia at about ten, missing two front teeth, holding up a fish almost 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 took his reading glasses off his head and turned them over in his hands.

“My daughter’s prom is tomorrow,” he said.

Georgia was eighteen. She was a senior at Ridgeview High.

I’d seen her around the office a few times. She’d come by after school sometimes to get a ride home, or to drop off lunch for her dad. She’d sit in the front office doing homework with her earbuds in. Once, she’d helped Rosa re-file about three hundred invoices when the filing cabinet broke.

We’d said hi 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 put his glasses back on his head. “I want you to take her.”

I laughed. I thought 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 folded his hands 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 didn’t say anything. I was trying to imagine walking into a high school gym in a suit, two years after I’d walked out of my own for the last time.

“Do this for me,” Sheldon added, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”

I thought about our washing machine.

It had broken three weeks earlier. It made a horrible grinding sound in the middle of the spin cycle and then just stopped, full of soapy water. The repairman said it would cost more to fix it than to buy a new one. So every Sunday since then, Mom had been hauling garbage bags full of clothes to the laundromat on Fourth Street and sitting there for three hours on her one day off.

I thought about Janelle’s school shoes. She was fourteen now and in eighth grade. Her sneakers had a split along the side where the rubber was coming away from the canvas. She’d been wrapping them with duct tape and coloring the tape with a black marker so nobody would notice.

I’d noticed.

If my boss wanted to give me a little extra money for taking his daughter to prom, it would make things a little easier for Mom and Janelle.

“Okay,” I said.

Sheldon let out a big breath and leaned back in his chair.

He looked relieved.

Almost too relieved.

That night, I told Mom and Janelle at dinner.

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 snapped up.

“You’re going to prom?”

“My boss’s daughter needs a date.”

Janelle put her book down on the table. She 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 was quiet. She was looking at me across the table with a little line 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 looked at me 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 got up from the table.

“Go get it,” she said. “Let me look at the sleeves.”