The Credit My Boss Took at My Retirement
Chapter 1
“Standing Orders did not exist at this company until Kyle and I sat down two years ago and built them from nothing.”
Brad Tolliver said that into a cordless microphone on a Friday afternoon in the break room of Reinholt Farm Supply, with a sheet cake behind him that had my name on it.
It was my retirement party. Thirty-one years. I was standing six feet from him with a paper plate in my hand.
I did not drop the plate. I want that known. I have thought about it a good deal since, and I am proud of that plate.
My name is Gail Lindgren. I am sixty-two years old, and I have lived my whole married life outside Harlow, Kansas, where the wheat runs to the horizon and the loudest thing on a Sunday is the grain dryer at the co-op elevator.
I came to Reinholt Farm Supply at thirty-one as a part-time bookkeeper, because Dale was a lineman for the rural electric and a second paycheck meant our daughter could go to college. I stayed for three decades.
The program Brad was talking about is the thing I built. I do not say that to puff myself up. I say it because it is a plain fact that sixty-one farm families in four counties could tell you in their sleep.
Brad is forty-one. He came to us three years ago from a big agribusiness outfit in Kansas City, wearing a quarter-zip vest with a company logo on the chest, and Carol Haas, who owns the place now that her father is gone, hired him to “modernize.”
He stood there in that same vest, holding a plastic cup of punch, and he went on.
“Gail has been a wonderful steward of the old way of doing things,” he said. “And we thank her for that. But the program that carries this company today, the program our customers count on, that is Kyle’s and my work, and I could not be prouder.”
He lifted the cup toward Kyle Dunn, who is twenty-six and had been with us eleven months.
Kyle was standing by the coffee urn. His face went the color of a boiled ham.
Somebody clapped. Just one person, a salesman from the seed side, and the sound died by itself in the middle of the room like a bird hitting glass.
Dale was at my elbow, sixty-four years old, six foot three, thirty-four years climbing poles in ice storms. I felt his whole body go tight. I felt him take a half step.
I put my hand flat on his chest and I pressed it, the way you press a dog that is about to go through a screen door.
“Not here,” I said, so low that only he could hear it.
“Gail,” he said.
“Let him finish his cake.”
When he finished, Brad turned the microphone toward me with a smile that had been taught to him, and said, “Gail, anything you’d like to say?”
“Thank you, Brad,” I said. “Thank you all for coming. There is plenty of cake. Please don’t let it go to waste.”
I put my plate on the table and cut the first piece myself.