The Bagger They Called Not Fit

Thursday, Delbert made the other kind of phone call. He called the number printed on the bottom of the Lindell’s receipt and asked for the district office. He was transferred twice. He said what he had to say to a woman named Noreen Bettis, who ran the district out of Indianapolis, and when she said she would look into it, he told her he was seventy eight and had time. Then half the poker table called the same number. So did the Sunday school teacher. So did the church woman from the service desk. Nobody I know of wrote a threatening letter or used a harsh word. They just called and said the same few true sentences, and Noreen Bettis, who is nobody’s fool, pulled up the store’s numbers and saw what Gene Boughton’s tablet had already been showing him for three days, a store whose weekly sales had slid by nearly a fifth, and a stack of comments she could not file under unusual.

Friday morning she drove down. She spent two hours behind the closed door of that same office. I do not know everything that was said in there, but I know what came out of it, because Boughton told me himself that evening, and because Verlene told me the same thing the next week without a word of difference. Noreen Bettis put a written warning in his personnel file, and she told him he would be running the store’s disability hiring review himself, start to finish, with the high school’s job coach program and the county, in his own time, and that she would be reading it.

That is the part that is less warm, and I will tell it plain, because my son deserves the full telling. The pressure that finally moved Gene Boughton was a woman above him with a spreadsheet, not his own conscience catching up. Most people’s first reckoning is the one that costs them something they can measure. I think what happened after that, though, is the part that mattered.

He drove to my house that evening, exactly a week to the day after he had fired my son. I did not know him well enough to recognize his car, a gray sedan I had never seen on our street, until he was already out of it and standing at the bottom of our porch steps, in the same tie he had worn at the ribbon cutting, looking, for the first time since I had met him, like a man who did not know exactly what to say.

“Mrs. Dunlap,” he said. “I’m sorry to come to your home. I didn’t think it was right to ask your son back over the phone.”

“Bradley’s inside,” I said, and I did not invite Mr. Boughton up onto the porch yet, because I wanted to hear what he had to say standing at the bottom of my steps first. Pete had come out behind me and stood in the doorway, arms folded, saying nothing, a good deal of grain dust still on his sleeves.

“I made a mistake last Friday,” he said. “I want to say that plain, not dressed up. I looked at a labor report and I saw a line item I thought I could cut, and I did not think about what that line item actually was. I have run six stores in nine years and I have never had a week like this one, and it took me most of it to understand that the two things were connected.”

“They were connected,” I said.