“It’s all right. We’ll have carrot soup.”
By the third Saturday, he’d stopped apologizing for every mistake. By the fifth, he was tying up tomatoes without asking. By the eighth, he had dirt under his fingernails that didn’t come out on Monday.
“My staff noticed,” he told me, grinning, showing me his hands. “Shelly asked if I’d been digging graves.”
He worked the teller window every Thursday. In his jeans and his gray T-shirt and his Dollar General sneakers.
The first Thursday, nobody knew who he was. Customers came up to the window and looked at him the way he’d looked at me. A young man in a T-shirt. They were polite, mostly. But a few of them asked, “Is the manager in?” Like they wanted somebody more important.
“I’m the manager,” he’d say.
They didn’t believe him.
One man from the city, passing through, asked to see Brandon’s ID before he’d hand over his deposit.
