“Because I need somebody careful and honest. Because replacing you with a person who doesn’t know the business would cost me a lot more than four dollars an hour. And because if I let you break yourself on that loading dock, I don’t deserve to call myself your employer.”
George looked down. He was relieved, but relief felt suspicious. It made him wait for the hidden condition.
“I don’t need charity.”
Paul sighed. “George, if I wanted to give you charity, I’d write a check. I’m offering you work. I’ll expect you to do it well. If you don’t, I’ll say so.”
“You’d still pay me nineteen?”
“That’s generally how employment functions.”
George almost laughed. The sound came out ragged.
“When do I start?”
“Technically about six minutes ago. But first you’re going to sit here with an ice pack on that knee while I call somebody who can look at it.”
George opened his mouth to object. Paul raised a finger.
“That’s part of the deal. You get the job, you stop doing stupid things to prove you deserve it. If you can’t manage that, we have a problem.”
For once, George did not argue. He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and let himself accept the cold pack Paul brought from the refrigerator.
Paul opened the binder to a page with a red mark at the top.
“Your first problem,” he said, “is a concrete supplier who billed us for five pallets we didn’t receive. Dave left me a note, but the paperwork’s a mess. I want the facts before I call them.”
George examined the invoices. He recognized the supplier, the trucker’s initials, the way the received quantities had been recorded. There were numbers that did not match, and for the first time all morning his attention moved away from the throbbing in his knee.
“Their invoice shows twelve,” he said. “The dock log shows seven. But the handwritten delivery note has a correction here. Somebody changed it from eight.”
Paul bent over his shoulder. “You see that already?”
“I see something odd. I don’t know what it means yet.”
“That’s a better answer than most people give me.”
He went to the door. “Take your time. Janelle’s coming back here after lunch to get you into the system. And George?”
“Yeah?”
“You won whatever they were offering at the fair. You don’t have to win every morning in my warehouse. Just do the job.”
Paul closed the door behind him.
George sat in the quiet office with a heavy binder on his lap. He could hear a fork-lift reversing outside and the low murmur of customers at the counter. His knee still hurt. He still owed rent next month. He would still need a doctor and more money than he had.
But for the first time since the pink notice had appeared, there was a path in front of him that did not lead through another fight.
It had a chair. A battered desk. A ledger full of numbers that needed to be put in order.
George picked up a pencil and began.
PART THREE: LEARNING ANOTHER KIND OF WORK
Chapter Thirteen: The First Line in the Ledger
Janelle arrived in the office at twelve-fifteen carrying a sandwich, two paper cups of coffee, and a tablet with a cracked corner.
“Paul says you’re my problem now,” she announced.
George looked up from the binder. He had been comparing the same three delivery slips for nearly an hour, and he had already found a discrepancy in the way a purchase order had been entered. The work absorbed him enough that he did not notice Janelle examining the ice pack strapped to his knee.
“I’m delighted to be somebody’s problem,” he said.
“That came out wrong.”
“It came out honest.”
She set down the coffee. “He wants me to show you the inventory software. Dave did everything on paper, and now we have about thirteen versions of the truth.”
“Thirteen is a lot of truth.”
“That’s why we need you.”
She pulled up a chair and turned the tablet toward him. The program was a maze of tiny boxes, icons, and menus that appeared to change position every time he blinked. George had used computers in the military, but the store’s software seemed designed by somebody who had never actually seen a warehouse. Janelle clicked through three screens and showed him how a purchase order became a received shipment and then a stock adjustment.
“What happens when the vendor sends seven pallets and the invoice says twelve?” he asked.
“We correct the receipt and flag the invoice.”
“Who approves the flag?”
“Paul. Or Dave, when he was here.”
“What if a shipment is delivered to a different location?”
Janelle paused. “Different location?”
He showed her the paper note. One of the delivery receipts had a different zip code handwritten at the bottom. The code belonged to a warehouse in the next county, not to Miller’s Hardware. The purchase order numbers were almost identical except for one digit.
