The Paper Vernon Forgot He Signed

I did it. I want to be honest about why. Part of it was that I loved the place. Part of it was pride, that this store would not die on my watch. And part of it, the biggest part, was that Vernon sat in my office and promised me that if I saved the store, the store would be as much mine as his someday. He said the words. “You keep this place standing, Wade, and you’ll never have to wonder where you stand in it.”

I was younger and I believed a promise from a scared man. But I was not a total fool. I told him I wanted it in writing, and to his credit, or maybe just because he was too scared that night to argue, he agreed. We drove over to Harlan Voss, the lawyer whose office is above the pharmacy on Main, and Harlan drew it up proper. The Continuity Agreement. Vernon signed it. His brother Dale, who owns a third of the store and lives down in Texas now, signed it. I signed it. Harlan notarized it and put a copy in his own file, which turned out to matter.

Then the rains came back, and the crops came in, and the money came back, and the fear went away. And when the fear went away, so did the memory of the promise. The store paid me back my thirty-one thousand over the next few years, in pieces, and everybody acted like that settled the whole thing. Vernon never mentioned the agreement again. Neither did I. I filed it and I kept doing the work, and I told myself the promise was still good even though the man who made it had plainly stopped thinking about it.

Now I turned the pages until I found the part I needed.

Section Seven

Harlan Voss is a careful man, and thank God for careful men.

Section Seven of that agreement had a heading in bold: Displacement and Release.

I will give it to you close to word for word, because I read it enough times that afternoon that I could nearly recite it.

If Wade Mercer, having served as principal operating manager of the dealership for a period of not less than ten years, is passed over for appointment to General Manager or equivalent successor authority in favor of any person possessing lesser documented experience and qualification, then the company shall, at Mr. Mercer’s sole election, either: name Mr. Mercer a partner of equal operating authority with a defined ownership interest of no less than one third; or release Mr. Mercer in full and immediately from any and all restrictive covenants, including without limitation the non-competition and non-solicitation clauses, and remit to Mr. Mercer his outstanding deferred compensation together with his 2013 capital contribution restored with interest.

I sat back in the chair.

There it was.

The non-compete was the leash. When I made manager, years back, I had signed a non-compete like everybody in a spot like mine does. It said that if I left Kessler Implement, I could not go work for a competing dealer or solicit our customers for two years within a hundred miles. That leash was the only thing that made me safe to Vernon. It was the reason he thought he could hand the chair to Trent and keep me chained to the counter. Where was I going to go? I was fifty-four years old and every dealer within a hundred miles was a competitor. He thought the leash held me.

But Section Seven cut the leash. If they passed me over for someone with lesser qualifications, and named their successor over me, then I got to choose. And Vernon had not just triggered it. He had triggered it about as cleanly as a man can trigger anything. He had taken a boy with nine months of half-learning and a robin’s-egg blazer and named him General Manager over the man who had run the place for twenty-two years and once put his own savings on the line to keep the doors open.

Harlan Voss had written that clause in 2013 to protect me from exactly this, and everybody involved had signed it and then forgotten it, because in 2013 nobody could imagine the day would come. The day had come. It had come at 3:47 that afternoon.

I did not feel triumphant, if you want to know. I felt tired, and a little sad, and underneath that, calm. The kind of calm a man feels when he finally stops arguing with himself about whether he is allowed to stand up.