Who Do You Love(114)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

Short answers, he’d told himself as he walked into the air-conditioning, down an aisle of lawn mowers and hedge trimmers. If Andy was hired, he’d be working the midnight-to-eight shift. Night stocker. The thought made him smile, and think, as jokes sometimes did, of Rachel, who would have laughed.

He found a door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, pushed through it, found another door with a strip of plastic reading JACK KINCAID, STORE MANAGER, and knocked. A voice yelled, “Come on in!” Andy walked into the office and saw a man struggling to get up from an ergonomic desk chair. Jack Kincaid wore steel-rimmed glasses, a dark-blue shirt, pleated khaki pants, and work boots. A pocket protector held half a dozen ballpoint pens, and a cell phone was holstered to his brown leather belt. Toothpick legs floated inside of his pants; spindly arms poked out of the short sleeves of his shirt. Between them was what looked like a giant inflatable sphere, perfectly round and looking as hard as a basketball, bulging at the buttons of the shirt (the bottom two, Andy noted, were unbuttoned, the cloth gaping to reveal a white undershirt).

Mr. Kincaid finally made it to his feet. “Andrew Landis?”

Andy had offered his hand. Jack Kincaid shook it once, gripping hard as he looked at him more closely. Andy tensed his muscles and braced for the inevitable.

“Not the Andy Landis, are you? Andy Landis the runner?”

“Yessir,” he said. He hated the servility in his voice, the fresh sweat underneath his arms, the way his body was still wound tight, desperate for motion. “Andy Landis,” he said. “That’s me.”

“Well,” said Jack Kincaid. “Well, well, well.” He rocked back on his heels. Given the belly, Andy half expected him to tip onto his back, but Mr. Kincaid, like a Weeble, wobbled but did not fall down. He took a seat, laced his fingers across that formidable gut, and looked Andy over, from the top of his head to his feet, encased in blameless brown loafers from the Hecht’s in Cherry Hill, where he’d taken Mr. Sills to buy clothes for his newest grandnephew.

Andy waited for Lo, how the mighty have fallen. He waited for Crime doesn’t pay or Actions have consequences or Serves you right. He waited for the man to tell him to get the hell out of his office and never darken the door of a Wallen Home Goods ever again.

Jack Kincaid finally spoke. “Need a job, huh?”

Andy nodded and sweated.

“Didn’t save any of that PowerUp money?”

“I paid my sponsors back, as much as I could.”

Jack Kincaid went quiet, pausing for what felt like forever. The office was small and airless, a concrete cube lit by fluorescent tubes, with a metal desk, cinder-block walls, and a plain office calendar thumbtacked to a bulletin board on one wall. On the desk, Andy saw family photographs—Jack Kincaid with his wife, adults who Andy supposed were his children, and little kids who had to be grandchildren.

“You have a beautiful family,” Andy said.

“Got any kids?” the other man asked.

Andy shook his head.

“You and your wife break up?”

Another nod. No sense correcting the man, telling him that Maisie had never been his wife. The news of their split had appeared in People magazine. Maisie had posed for a picture, barefoot in a lacy white sundress. Running Free, read the headline. The piece had been a roundup about the wives and families of the Athens Nine. The quote that Maisie had given, printed in big letters, read, Andy Landis wasn’t the man I thought he was.

Kincaid picked up Andy’s résumé and flapped it in the air a few times. “You’re overqualified.” He gave a dry, chuffing laugh. “Hell, probably a monkey would be overqualified for this. It’s midnight to eight in the morning. You’ll run a flat-loader and a forklift. Break down boxes, build endcaps, get contractors’ orders ready to go. Dust the stuff on the high shelves, dry-mop the floors, recycle the cardboard, clean the restrooms, make sure everything’s shipshape in the morning. No customers.” He considered, giving the hard mound of his belly an affectionate pat. “Probably that’s for the best. It’s minimum wage, and I can’t offer more, so don’t ask. You don’t have any injuries, do you? Back’s okay?”

Andy shook his head. “No injuries.” His back was fine. He’d had three operations on his right knee, but that, too, was fine, at least for work like this.

“We drug test, you know. Probably not for the stuff you were doing—we don’t have many clerks on steroids—but everything else. Booze, too. Don’t even think about showing up loaded.”

“I don’t drink.” This was another part of the mythology that the publicists had cultivated: Andy Landis as a clean-cut, square-jawed, All-American boy who wouldn’t celebrate a victory with so much as a beer. That, of course, had only added to the irony when it turned out the all-American boy was a doper. Kincaid gave him a dubious look before folding the résumé in half, then in quarters, and setting it in the middle of the empty blotter at the center of his desk.