From the Novel Work to Do
by Jules Wernersbach
ROZ
“Goddamnit, who left the broccoli out?” No one was around to answer. They were out of bottled water, three customers wanted her attention, and there was a ceiling leak in the produce kitchen. Again. Water from the roof pooled in the waxy box, more than half a dozen crowns lost, slid out of a hole in the corner and dripped onto Roz’s sneaker.
It was her day off.
What’s going on? People still coming in? Registers are busy.
Eleanor texted from her warm, dry house out in Bastrop, checking sales from the comfort of her laptop on a piece of software that was supposed to improve efficiency, but mostly increased surveillance. It was better than the alternative. The boss would only get in the way here.
Roz slid a bucket under the leak, dumped the broccoli, recorded the shrink. “What did I come back here for?” Kale. The produce fridge was a mess, stacks of boxes on the floor, open and half-empty, tilting into one another, kohlrabi mixing with celery, a fifty-pound sack of carrots spilling sixteen ounce bags. No kale to be found. Who cooked kale in a hurricane? Co-op customers, that’s who.
Out on the floor, the cereal aisle was jammed with a long line of shoppers disgruntled they had to wait. Damp rain jackets brushed up against what was left of the instant oatmeal and breakfast bars. All morning Roz refreshed the radar and tracked the churning red and yellow storm stretching its western arm from the Gulf of Mexico to the center of Texas. Hurricane Helen. It was an honest to god disaster down in Houston. Just supposed to be some rain for them in Austin, but this rain was heavy and the winds were strong. Kevin texted when Roz was still in bed listening to Molly fill the coffee maker. Their first day off together in two months. He wasn’t going to force her to come in, he said, but they were already short-staffed, he was trapped at a register, Hala was late again, and no one was overseeing grocery. What was she supposed to do? Roz was Senior Floor Manager. It was her job to keep everything together. Molly understood.
She squeezed sideways between carts in search of kale woman. Two customers trailed her with questions. A queue of needs to get through before she could restock the bread, which was down to white dinner rolls, she knew it by clocking the contents of the carts that pressed her against the emptying shelves. They wanted bread today, and milk and eggs, and ice cream and all of their donuts, and beer and wine and pretzels and popcorn and muffins and frozen pizza and at least ten people had asked if they had batteries, which they did not.
“Sorry, we’re all out of kale. We have some rainbow chard.”
“Chard is not the same.” Kale woman, short and gray in a catalog-perfect rain jacket, turned her eyes to the vacant shelves. Roz knew it was not the same. She’d been at the Co-op for a decade. She knew the difference between chard and kale, turnips and parsnips, hippies and yuppies and boomers and hipsters and people like her: workers.
“Busy day, ma’am, sorry about that.”
Another customer appeared. “Do you have hot chocolate?”
Hello. Earth to Roz. What’s going on over there?
A voice cut the pop music coming through the speakers: “Roz to reg three! We’re frozen again.”
“And marshmallows?”
“Follow me.”
She took the customer on a circuitous route to avoid Dairy, where all of the register lines tangled into one lump, tensions mounting about who was first. Instead, she moved around the front, past the registers, shouldering through the lines and parting carts like a retail Moses, listening to wind whip the windows.
“What about sugar-free cocoa? And all of this is gluten-free, right?”
Roz showed the woman the sugar-free. Assured her of the absence of gluten. Noted that the company planted a tree in South America for every hundred cocoas they sold.
Why’d register three stop? Who’ve you got on that one?
A hand gripped her elbow. Hala. Roz could smell the sweat in her curly dark hair, the cold brew on her breath reminding Roz that she left the apartment without drinking any coffee. Didn’t eat breakfast, either. There was no time. Her body fed on endorphins.
“We’re leaking in crackers,” Hala said.
“There are buckets in the produce kitchen. Grab one.” Hala knew this. Everyone knew this. They brought problems to her like tired kindergarteners.
“I’m on bathroom duty. Clogged toilet. Just wanted to let you know.” Hala dragged the yellow bucket and heavy-duty mop behind her, blue rubber gloves dangling from the back pocket of her jeans.
“Lift the seat before you plunge!” Roz called after her. “Try not to slosh!” Hala waved a hand, not looking back.
I’m getting an error message about register three. Can you fix it?
A young guy stepped in front of her wearing a hoodie and shorts and flip-flops. The Co-op was at the edge of the university, in a sprawl of student apartments Roz had lived in, briefly, when she’d thought school mattered. “I can’t find any milk. Can someone check?”
She wished she could replicate herself. A staff of Rozes. The dream. “Milk is at the back of the store,” she told the college boy, who stared at her, awaiting further direction. “I’ll meet you over there in a minute.”
“Forget it.” He walked out the door into rain whipping sideways across the parking lot. A small loss. College students came and went. It was the older customers Roz worried about. Boomers with salaries to burn on four dollar cans of organic beans and nine dollar packages of organic pasta. Those were the people they needed to keep. They had renovated the store for them a few years ago. Widened the aisles. Imagined an uptick in wheelchairs a decade from now. It wasn’t enough, though. They were losing their competitive edge. They needed to revamp their website. Figure out delivery. They needed to--
And get the sandbags out. Have them ready. Rain’s going to keep coming.
Shel stepped aside at register three, all six feet, five inches of him. No wonder produce was trashed. They were a well-oiled machine until the produce manager had to scan customers. Even at peak staffing, they were operating with a skeleton crew.
Roz hit the power switch on the ancient register, dragged the back of her wrist across her forehead and felt sweat skate across her skin. A white woman in a purple raincoat stood there with her credit card in her hand, eyeing the rain through the windows and her half dozen containers of vegan ice cream softening in the bagging area, a long line of annoyed faces behind her because they lost the game, chose the wrong line, as if any of the lines at the Co-op’s five registers were moving fast enough today. “You’re not going to have to ring it all through again, are you?”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
The woman sighed. The register came back to life. Roz scanned it all fast as a whip, a little solo competition rated by speed and accuracy, a demonstration of the dexterity she’d honed over more than fifteen years in the grocery business. First at H-E-B, now the Co-op, a career ascendancy she had not pictured when she gave up on her undeclared major and started working for paychecks instead of grades. Much to the dismay of her parents, who wanted paychecks, yes, but much, much bigger ones. Fastest scanner in the West. It wasn’t exactly like her brother’s shining success as a real estate magnate, but Roz was proud of it.
Shel slid back in behind the register. He had a body like a commercial refrigerator, beard and mutton chops their own continent on the bottom half of his face. They had to have a talk last month about being gentle with the summer fruit. Bruised peaches and nectarines were filling up the shrink log, his hands forgetting their strength. Hurt fruit aside, Shel was one of her best hires. He’d been there almost four years. De facto produce manager. Eleanor wouldn’t let her promote anyone after the last produce guy left in a blaze of flung fennel, irate over a denied raise and ignored pleas to participate in a local farmers’ market. Roz had to be the one to tell him, ducking fennel shrapnel, not always successfully.
Her phone vibrated again—her brother texting for the third time that morning, as though he knew she was thinking of him, as though he was that good. She let it pile up with Eleanor’s messages. She didn’t care if he was in town. God forbid he check a weather report and consider what might be going on in her life. But of course, that was the way it was in their family. Whatever Tyler was doing was the most important thing that could be done, an example of success their mother, the beloved high school principal in their Oklahoma suburb, could tout at career assemblies. Roz, the college drop-out, had once been asked to speak to the school’s gay-straight alliance, four students who met in the basement art studio an hour after school let out, when the halls of Roz’s alma mater were ghost quiet.
“Next in line!”
Kevin appeared at her shoulder. “She wants sandbags. It never floods up here.” His orange ponytail was loose. The top buttons of his ironed blue shirt were undone. Their LL Bean-perfect Operations Supervisor looked like a little boy lost at sea.
“What does it hurt, right? Better to be prepared? If that’s what she wants?” Roz’s success at the Co-op largely came from doing exactly what Eleanor wanted. It worked. Eleanor invented a whole new title for her, Senior Floor Manager, even if it wasn’t the role Roz wanted. The store should have a General Manager. As it was, the seniority between Roz and Kevin was murky. Becoming GM would clarify that Roz was in charge. And she wouldn’t have to run every little decision by Eleanor first, which would be particularly useful on a day like today.
“Any word from her about closing early?” Kevin asked.
“Has it ever happened?”
They looked for answers in the street on the other side of the ten-foot-tall front windows. Sheets of rain washed Guadalupe. Amazing to think the system reached all the way back to the Gulf, more than two hundred miles away. Roz knew something about weather, their planet’s moody little pressures and cleanses. She used to be married to a meteorologist. A woman who would have hated the rumpled t-shirt Roz walked out the door wearing that morning, the cheap secondhand jeans, the way Molly had buzzed the sides of Roz’s hair too close this time, the pink scalp winking through in her rain-battered reflection. She snapped the tight elastic of her sweaty sports bra through her shirt. One of the perks of divorce: getting to wear anything she wanted.
“Our totals are going to be wild today,” Roz said. She followed Kevin toward the information desk, pausing to right the overturned bin of umbrellas by the door. “We have to be pushing Thanksgiving Tuesday numbers, at least.” She was glad she wasn’t missing it.
He grabbed a mop and ran it over the trail of wet footprints. “With only a third of the staff.”
Another notification popped on Roz’s phone. Local station KXBOP. She’d turned on alerts that morning after she’d dragged herself out of bed and told Molly she was going in. Pretended she didn’t hear Molly sniffling in the bathroom while Roz pulled on an old Dragon Fruits team t-shirt. Pretended she didn’t know Kevin was about to text Molly next. Molly had been at the Co-op two and a half years, just a little bit longer than they’d been dating.
“Let me check the latest weather report.”
Roz dipped into the office, where it was quiet. She tapped the video. It was nothing unusual, checking the weather. There was a hurricane outside. This did not count as part of the stalking she had sworn to herself she would stop. Or at least reduce.
Audrey’s hair was soaked and stringy. It had grown down to her clavicle since the last time Roz saw her ex-wife, months ago at a restaurant where Audrey was having dinner with her girlfriend, Kelli with an I, as in, I fucked your wife behind your back for months.
KXBOP had sent Audrey out into the field. There were dark bags under her eyes. Her face was pasty. She was wearing a red rain jacket Roz did not recognize and white-knuckling a microphone. Audrey’s TV voice echoed from her palm, chopped by gusts of wind into a tinny, fleeting noise. Audrey was struggling. Roz could hear it.
“I’m coming to you live from Congress Avenue which, you can see, is an absolute ghost town today. Shops have boarded up their windows in preparation for fifty-mile-an-hour winds and record-setting rainfall, maybe twelve inches or more by the time this is done. A few tree limbs are down and blocking main roads. Jill will have more for you when she does the road and traffic report. Town Lake,” Audrey pulled a length of wet hair from her bottom lip and there was a spark of—what was that? “We’re not quite crested, but it’s rising fast. We’re watching patterns very closely for any possible tornado activity. Stay home and keep it tuned to KXBOP for the latest developments on Hurricane Helen.”
The video stopped. Roz hit play again and paused at the twenty-six second mark. On Audrey’s left hand, the hand holding the microphone, there was a glint half-covered by her sleeve. The video played again and there it was. It caught Roz’s throat. The diamond ring sharp as lightning.
It was her day off.
What’s going on? People still coming in? Registers are busy.
Eleanor texted from her warm, dry house out in Bastrop, checking sales from the comfort of her laptop on a piece of software that was supposed to improve efficiency, but mostly increased surveillance. It was better than the alternative. The boss would only get in the way here.
Roz slid a bucket under the leak, dumped the broccoli, recorded the shrink. “What did I come back here for?” Kale. The produce fridge was a mess, stacks of boxes on the floor, open and half-empty, tilting into one another, kohlrabi mixing with celery, a fifty-pound sack of carrots spilling sixteen ounce bags. No kale to be found. Who cooked kale in a hurricane? Co-op customers, that’s who.
Out on the floor, the cereal aisle was jammed with a long line of shoppers disgruntled they had to wait. Damp rain jackets brushed up against what was left of the instant oatmeal and breakfast bars. All morning Roz refreshed the radar and tracked the churning red and yellow storm stretching its western arm from the Gulf of Mexico to the center of Texas. Hurricane Helen. It was an honest to god disaster down in Houston. Just supposed to be some rain for them in Austin, but this rain was heavy and the winds were strong. Kevin texted when Roz was still in bed listening to Molly fill the coffee maker. Their first day off together in two months. He wasn’t going to force her to come in, he said, but they were already short-staffed, he was trapped at a register, Hala was late again, and no one was overseeing grocery. What was she supposed to do? Roz was Senior Floor Manager. It was her job to keep everything together. Molly understood.
She squeezed sideways between carts in search of kale woman. Two customers trailed her with questions. A queue of needs to get through before she could restock the bread, which was down to white dinner rolls, she knew it by clocking the contents of the carts that pressed her against the emptying shelves. They wanted bread today, and milk and eggs, and ice cream and all of their donuts, and beer and wine and pretzels and popcorn and muffins and frozen pizza and at least ten people had asked if they had batteries, which they did not.
“Sorry, we’re all out of kale. We have some rainbow chard.”
“Chard is not the same.” Kale woman, short and gray in a catalog-perfect rain jacket, turned her eyes to the vacant shelves. Roz knew it was not the same. She’d been at the Co-op for a decade. She knew the difference between chard and kale, turnips and parsnips, hippies and yuppies and boomers and hipsters and people like her: workers.
“Busy day, ma’am, sorry about that.”
Another customer appeared. “Do you have hot chocolate?”
Hello. Earth to Roz. What’s going on over there?
A voice cut the pop music coming through the speakers: “Roz to reg three! We’re frozen again.”
“And marshmallows?”
“Follow me.”
She took the customer on a circuitous route to avoid Dairy, where all of the register lines tangled into one lump, tensions mounting about who was first. Instead, she moved around the front, past the registers, shouldering through the lines and parting carts like a retail Moses, listening to wind whip the windows.
“What about sugar-free cocoa? And all of this is gluten-free, right?”
Roz showed the woman the sugar-free. Assured her of the absence of gluten. Noted that the company planted a tree in South America for every hundred cocoas they sold.
Why’d register three stop? Who’ve you got on that one?
A hand gripped her elbow. Hala. Roz could smell the sweat in her curly dark hair, the cold brew on her breath reminding Roz that she left the apartment without drinking any coffee. Didn’t eat breakfast, either. There was no time. Her body fed on endorphins.
“We’re leaking in crackers,” Hala said.
“There are buckets in the produce kitchen. Grab one.” Hala knew this. Everyone knew this. They brought problems to her like tired kindergarteners.
“I’m on bathroom duty. Clogged toilet. Just wanted to let you know.” Hala dragged the yellow bucket and heavy-duty mop behind her, blue rubber gloves dangling from the back pocket of her jeans.
“Lift the seat before you plunge!” Roz called after her. “Try not to slosh!” Hala waved a hand, not looking back.
I’m getting an error message about register three. Can you fix it?
A young guy stepped in front of her wearing a hoodie and shorts and flip-flops. The Co-op was at the edge of the university, in a sprawl of student apartments Roz had lived in, briefly, when she’d thought school mattered. “I can’t find any milk. Can someone check?”
She wished she could replicate herself. A staff of Rozes. The dream. “Milk is at the back of the store,” she told the college boy, who stared at her, awaiting further direction. “I’ll meet you over there in a minute.”
“Forget it.” He walked out the door into rain whipping sideways across the parking lot. A small loss. College students came and went. It was the older customers Roz worried about. Boomers with salaries to burn on four dollar cans of organic beans and nine dollar packages of organic pasta. Those were the people they needed to keep. They had renovated the store for them a few years ago. Widened the aisles. Imagined an uptick in wheelchairs a decade from now. It wasn’t enough, though. They were losing their competitive edge. They needed to revamp their website. Figure out delivery. They needed to--
And get the sandbags out. Have them ready. Rain’s going to keep coming.
Shel stepped aside at register three, all six feet, five inches of him. No wonder produce was trashed. They were a well-oiled machine until the produce manager had to scan customers. Even at peak staffing, they were operating with a skeleton crew.
Roz hit the power switch on the ancient register, dragged the back of her wrist across her forehead and felt sweat skate across her skin. A white woman in a purple raincoat stood there with her credit card in her hand, eyeing the rain through the windows and her half dozen containers of vegan ice cream softening in the bagging area, a long line of annoyed faces behind her because they lost the game, chose the wrong line, as if any of the lines at the Co-op’s five registers were moving fast enough today. “You’re not going to have to ring it all through again, are you?”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
The woman sighed. The register came back to life. Roz scanned it all fast as a whip, a little solo competition rated by speed and accuracy, a demonstration of the dexterity she’d honed over more than fifteen years in the grocery business. First at H-E-B, now the Co-op, a career ascendancy she had not pictured when she gave up on her undeclared major and started working for paychecks instead of grades. Much to the dismay of her parents, who wanted paychecks, yes, but much, much bigger ones. Fastest scanner in the West. It wasn’t exactly like her brother’s shining success as a real estate magnate, but Roz was proud of it.
Shel slid back in behind the register. He had a body like a commercial refrigerator, beard and mutton chops their own continent on the bottom half of his face. They had to have a talk last month about being gentle with the summer fruit. Bruised peaches and nectarines were filling up the shrink log, his hands forgetting their strength. Hurt fruit aside, Shel was one of her best hires. He’d been there almost four years. De facto produce manager. Eleanor wouldn’t let her promote anyone after the last produce guy left in a blaze of flung fennel, irate over a denied raise and ignored pleas to participate in a local farmers’ market. Roz had to be the one to tell him, ducking fennel shrapnel, not always successfully.
Her phone vibrated again—her brother texting for the third time that morning, as though he knew she was thinking of him, as though he was that good. She let it pile up with Eleanor’s messages. She didn’t care if he was in town. God forbid he check a weather report and consider what might be going on in her life. But of course, that was the way it was in their family. Whatever Tyler was doing was the most important thing that could be done, an example of success their mother, the beloved high school principal in their Oklahoma suburb, could tout at career assemblies. Roz, the college drop-out, had once been asked to speak to the school’s gay-straight alliance, four students who met in the basement art studio an hour after school let out, when the halls of Roz’s alma mater were ghost quiet.
“Next in line!”
Kevin appeared at her shoulder. “She wants sandbags. It never floods up here.” His orange ponytail was loose. The top buttons of his ironed blue shirt were undone. Their LL Bean-perfect Operations Supervisor looked like a little boy lost at sea.
“What does it hurt, right? Better to be prepared? If that’s what she wants?” Roz’s success at the Co-op largely came from doing exactly what Eleanor wanted. It worked. Eleanor invented a whole new title for her, Senior Floor Manager, even if it wasn’t the role Roz wanted. The store should have a General Manager. As it was, the seniority between Roz and Kevin was murky. Becoming GM would clarify that Roz was in charge. And she wouldn’t have to run every little decision by Eleanor first, which would be particularly useful on a day like today.
“Any word from her about closing early?” Kevin asked.
“Has it ever happened?”
They looked for answers in the street on the other side of the ten-foot-tall front windows. Sheets of rain washed Guadalupe. Amazing to think the system reached all the way back to the Gulf, more than two hundred miles away. Roz knew something about weather, their planet’s moody little pressures and cleanses. She used to be married to a meteorologist. A woman who would have hated the rumpled t-shirt Roz walked out the door wearing that morning, the cheap secondhand jeans, the way Molly had buzzed the sides of Roz’s hair too close this time, the pink scalp winking through in her rain-battered reflection. She snapped the tight elastic of her sweaty sports bra through her shirt. One of the perks of divorce: getting to wear anything she wanted.
“Our totals are going to be wild today,” Roz said. She followed Kevin toward the information desk, pausing to right the overturned bin of umbrellas by the door. “We have to be pushing Thanksgiving Tuesday numbers, at least.” She was glad she wasn’t missing it.
He grabbed a mop and ran it over the trail of wet footprints. “With only a third of the staff.”
Another notification popped on Roz’s phone. Local station KXBOP. She’d turned on alerts that morning after she’d dragged herself out of bed and told Molly she was going in. Pretended she didn’t hear Molly sniffling in the bathroom while Roz pulled on an old Dragon Fruits team t-shirt. Pretended she didn’t know Kevin was about to text Molly next. Molly had been at the Co-op two and a half years, just a little bit longer than they’d been dating.
“Let me check the latest weather report.”
Roz dipped into the office, where it was quiet. She tapped the video. It was nothing unusual, checking the weather. There was a hurricane outside. This did not count as part of the stalking she had sworn to herself she would stop. Or at least reduce.
Audrey’s hair was soaked and stringy. It had grown down to her clavicle since the last time Roz saw her ex-wife, months ago at a restaurant where Audrey was having dinner with her girlfriend, Kelli with an I, as in, I fucked your wife behind your back for months.
KXBOP had sent Audrey out into the field. There were dark bags under her eyes. Her face was pasty. She was wearing a red rain jacket Roz did not recognize and white-knuckling a microphone. Audrey’s TV voice echoed from her palm, chopped by gusts of wind into a tinny, fleeting noise. Audrey was struggling. Roz could hear it.
“I’m coming to you live from Congress Avenue which, you can see, is an absolute ghost town today. Shops have boarded up their windows in preparation for fifty-mile-an-hour winds and record-setting rainfall, maybe twelve inches or more by the time this is done. A few tree limbs are down and blocking main roads. Jill will have more for you when she does the road and traffic report. Town Lake,” Audrey pulled a length of wet hair from her bottom lip and there was a spark of—what was that? “We’re not quite crested, but it’s rising fast. We’re watching patterns very closely for any possible tornado activity. Stay home and keep it tuned to KXBOP for the latest developments on Hurricane Helen.”
The video stopped. Roz hit play again and paused at the twenty-six second mark. On Audrey’s left hand, the hand holding the microphone, there was a glint half-covered by her sleeve. The video played again and there it was. It caught Roz’s throat. The diamond ring sharp as lightning.
RANDY
“Two percent is gone. I’ve got coconut, soy. No more almond.”
“Hey Randy, this woman’s looking for vegan cookie dough like it’s going to save her marriage.”
“Won’t have any until Tuesday.”
“Do we have any more bread anywhere? I can’t find Roz.”
“Nope. Out of bread. There was a bag of sprouted English muffins in frozen half an hour ago and that was it.”
The door to the dairy fridge opened and closed again and again. Hala, Naomi, Zoey, Zach, Gracie, Robyn, Flora, Carl, Reggie. A carousel of questions. They had nothing. Two cartons of eggs, half of them broken. Some tofu noodles. Yogurt. Randy sweated through the cold, slicing open boxes and tearing thin cardboard, filling the case from behind with what little was left. Clipped customer voices came through from the other side of the dairy case, anxious and in a hurry, their fingers grabbing at the remaining goods like zombies. Randy slid a container of chocolate yogurt forward and someone yelped at the dead space come alive.
In their eighteen years at the Co-op, they’d seen storm surges like this, and holiday blitzes that stripped them down to their floor tile. But it had been a while. The holidays weren’t as big as they used to be. The staff wasn’t ready for it. Randy’s knees weren’t equipped for it, either. Eight hours on their feet felt different at fifty than it had at thirty-two. They couldn’t run as fast at the softball games. Zach had moved them to the pitcher’s mound this season.
Randy tied up flattened boxes with twine, stepped out of the fridge into the stockroom where the wifi was better. Devastating photos of Houston scrolled beneath their thumb. The Red Cross preparing beds for refugees at the convention center downtown. Funnel clouds sighted in north Austin. The winds were stronger in Central Texas than anyone predicted. Randy worried about Arkansas, if their sisters were listening for tornado sirens. If their boyfriends were around to board up the windows.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Hala slammed through the swinging doors, pushing the mop bucket ahead of her. “I need a fucking shower after that bathroom. Like seriously, what is wrong with people?” Randy took the bucket, squeezed the mop dry, dumped the gray water. Hala pulled out her phone. “My boyfriend is freaking. He’s in one of those new buildings on Riverside? Eighth floor, but still. Said the river’s crazy high.” Randy didn’t remember this boyfriend’s name. Hala had a new one every other week, some hipster covered in tattoos who bought kombucha with her discount. She met them all at shows, the backs of her hands stamped by a dozen clubs. She worked doors and barbacked as a side gig to make rent.
“They’ve got to be closing the bridges any minute,” Randy said. Their phone buzzed. Tonight’s date. I guess we should probably cancel, huh? Take a rain check lol. It had taken three days of bullshitting about Game of Thrones to find an opening to ask this person out. The girl had just broken up with someone. Randy was fine with being a rebound. It was kind of ideal, all of the fire and fury with none of the wedding bells, but the girl was skittish. They sent a thumbs up, Some other time! One more stranger returned to the ether.
Gracie pushed through the doors, panting, bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat. “Chips, pretzels, we got anything?”
“Just the gluten-free.” Randy helped her pull down boxes, eye-level with the dark circles in the armpits of her Mellow Mushroom t-shirt. Gracie moved from San Antonio a few years ago, taking what she thought was only a semester off from Texas State to regroup and focus on her art. That was the way it happened. Randy had thought they were taking a break from restaurant life when they got here, giving themselves a job with a slower pace while they got sober and figured things out, and then suddenly, bam, there they were, blowing out fifty candles on a day-old cake Gracie and Shel smuggled out of bakery shrink. Still at the Co-op.
They followed Gracie into the clogged chip aisle carrying a box of seaweed-flavored rice puffs. “I’ll be in Produce if you need me. Remember to drink water. And eat something, okay? I have some tofu dogs in the fridge, if you need them.” She gave a thumbs up.
Randy filled up the apples, straightened the bell peppers, swapped out the bucket taking the leak in the kitchen. The roof was a mess. Just like the dim stock room that needed a new lighting system, sockets permanently blown out, the shelves rigged to the wall with amateur anchors. The committee was keeping a list.
They faced the cheeses, moved all the way over by wine, Roz’s brilliant idea. If anyone had bothered to ask Randy, they would have moved the hummus and tempeh over there, kept the cheese with the yogurt. None of the staff had any input about changes. This was also on the list.
“Yo.” Zach sailed by, his banana-yellow hair flapping. “Help me with beer?”
Randy followed him into the stock room, loaded up the hand truck with the shitty wheel, and steered the last of their canned IPA out to the floor. “My dad just texted,” Zach said, stacking bright blue cases of six packs chest-high. “They closed all their shops. Sent everyone home.” Zach was heir to a juice bar franchise he didn’t want. His father showed up at the Co-op every once in a while in Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, his bright red face beaming as he handed his son liquefied carrots and sugary smoothies Zach either trashed or gave to Zoey, who came up behind them now, her flamingo pink hair yanked into a high ponytail. They had done their dye jobs at home together, coming in last week with pink and yellow palms and still claiming they weren’t fucking.
None of Randy’s coworkers were aware of how often their story lines repeated, how the scripts were ingrained in the aisles and end caps. This one would sleep with that one. This one would be a klepto and get caught. That one would always leave half-eaten food at a register. These two would become roommates. These two would be frenemies. They would all go out and get drunk together after work, forge friendships and become fuck buddies, complain about the pay and swear for months that they were leaving until they finally did, the players turning over month after month, year after year, but the drama remaining the same, like a soap opera that had been on so long, the writers repeated the plot twists and no one noticed. Randy loved it. They all papered over one another, a continuum of Co-op worker that kept the whole messy operation alive. Randy felt lucky to be part of it. Life could have turned out a lot worse.
“The Mayor’s telling everyone to close,” Zoey said.
“Stock room.” Randy flattened beer boxes as Zach grabbed the hand truck. Gracie was back there with Hala, and Molly now, too. Together, they were half of the committee running administration for the Guadalupe Street Co-op Employee Collective for Fair and Sustainable Working Conditions. It was a mouthful. Randy only said the name out loud at meetings.
“Hey.” Randy nodded at Molly, their work wife—though they wouldn’t say that in anyone’s earshot. Not since the holiday party. “So much for a day off, huh?”
Molly twisted her long, brassy red hair into a knot. “Is anyone surprised?”
“The Mayor’s telling all non-essential businesses to close,” Zoey said. She looked up from her phone, the thick black liner on her eyes smudged, a trail of pretty soft pink glitter floating from the corners of her lashes. Zoey had booked it out of her rural Missouri town in the middle of the night with a duffel bag and a ride from someone she met on Craigslist. She’d been eighteen, leaving a community of Latter Day Saints. Randy hadn’t had the courage to leave their own truck-stop town until their mid-twenties, tired of watching their sisters stumble in from their first marriages whenever they felt like it, drunk with threats of divorce on a Tuesday night. Zoey was the one always inviting everyone to fundraisers and protests and packing her bag full of shrink to pass out to people in encampments by the interstate. She was the first one Randy talked to last year about organizing, after the produce manager quit and Shel was given his job but not his title or pay. She’d lit up like Randy invented a new Christmas.
“Are we essential?” Hala asked, still squinting at her phone.
They stood in a circle reading the same alerts. “We should close,” Randy said, because everyone was waiting for them to say something.
“Who wants to talk to Roz and Kevin?” Gracie asked. Everyone looked at Randy.
“I got it,” Randy said. It was why they were president. They weren’t afraid of Roz. “Listen, a pack of tofu dogs split open. They’re in the fridge. Make sure y’all eat today.”
“I’ll come with you,” Zoey said.
Randy paused. “Let’s not gang up on her. Let me try first.”
“Solve it with a secret middle-aged handshake?” Zoey muttered. Randy pushed out onto the floor, pretending not to hear.
None of them were afraid of Roz, really. But she was the boss and people avoided her. Randy had been at the Co-op eight years when Roz clocked in for the first time. She’d been an instant star, moving her line faster than the others, never making mistakes with the credit card machine. A queer person at a time when the only queers on staff were Randy, Eleanor, and an undergrad who got fired for making out with his boyfriend on the patio when he was supposed to be clearing trash. Roz’s arrival had felt like a moment.
They shouldered their way through the crowd swarming the hot and cold bars, past the cold drinks case and the rack of Fair Trade socks, and found Roz in the office with her phone in her hand, stalking her ex-wife. Again.
“Are you seeing what the Mayor’s saying?”
Roz looked up, surprised, and slid her phone in her pocket. The divorce had been seismic. Five years ago? Four? The only time Randy could remember Roz calling out sick. Roz and Randy had never been close. She used to smile at stories of Randy’s dating misadventures, but offered no comment. Afraid, maybe, that Randy’s singleness would infiltrate her partnered domesticity, slide the wedding band right off her finger. By the time the divorce papers arrived, Roz had jumped Randy for the Floor Manager position, even though Randy had seniority and Roz knew they wanted it. Queerness turned out not to be so much of a bond after all.
“I’m tracking the weather,” Roz said.
“What’s Eleanor say?”
Roz squeezed the back of her neck. She could make their case with Eleanor about all kinds of things, if she wanted, but Roz was afraid of her. It was her marriage all over again. Roz lost her bark around a certain kind of woman, wagged her tail and chased their ball like an obedient puppy desperate for a pat on the head.
“We’re holding course,” Roz said. Her deodorant was pungent, the new Tom’s sea breeze scent. She smelled like a clam bar.
“It’s supposed to get worse before it gets better. We might only have a small window to get everyone home. We should close.”
“That isn’t prudent.”
“Dude, come on. Look out the window.”
Roz shook her head. Randy caught the darting worry in her eyes, the uncertainty. Pity slithered through the cracks of their resolve. Her puppet role between owner and staff was designed for impotent enforcement of Eleanor’s whims. She knew it, they all knew it. It was painful to watch. “Cover Naomi, please, so she can post to socials that we’re open. Reg four.”
When Eleanor made them Dairy Manager almost a decade ago, Randy had prided themselves on negotiating one important detail: they would never run a cash register again. But as staff shrunk and sales tightened, no one had just one job anymore. With years of catch-all Co-op work under their belt, Randy was the most versatile among them. And so they were in a particularly ready position to get hosed.
Randy stuffed their vest and flannel under the register, their nametag hitting the chest of their Hobbit t-shirt. “Next!”
But they weren’t without recourse. The committee had talked to all of their coworkers and they finally had nearly all of the signatures they needed on the petition—at least thirty percent of the staff—to file with the National Labor Board to hold a vote to join union OPEIU Local 199. A vote they would win, easily. Better pay, real benefits, clear job descriptions, and actual staff input into how the place was run. That was all they wanted. The city was changing. Randy’s rent was going up, by a lot. The Co-op had to change, too.
Randy scanned a dozen boxes of pasta and ten cans of beans, jars of tomato sauce, the little tofu boxes that didn’t need to be refrigerated. They pitched the spiel about becoming a Co-op member, one hundred bucks a year and you got special sales and the idea that you supported your community without having to actually do anything but buy groceries. They weren’t that kind of Co-op where people volunteered. All members had to do was shop.
The last can of adzuki beans blipped across the scanner and all of the lights blinked, the screen winked. The man in front of Randy whipped his head around as though he might catch the culprit who flipped the light switch. “It happens,” Randy said. “Okay, that’ll be one-ninety-four-thirty-two.”
Darkness dropped across the store. A sharp moment of stunned silence engulfed them. No music, no beeping computers, no running refrigerators.
“We’ve got a backup generator!” Roz called. “Everyone hang tight!”
Scared chatter erupted. A customer abandoned a cart in Randy’s line, then another, each of them following like sheep. Randy whipped around, looking for Molly. She was in the kitchen alone. There were no windows back there. It would be pitch black. Randy squeezed the metal edge of the checkout. They couldn’t leave their drawer unattended.
Tiny lights popped from the tops of phones. Blue-lit faces floated above screens, scrolling for information. There was the crunch of chips and crackers among those who held their place, the noise of hands rooting in cereal boxes, of puffy sealed bags releasing their pressure to the thick air. The minute a system broke down, it was a free-for-all.
Customers rushed the front doors, frantically waving their hands at the dead sensor, their mass forming a grainy silhouette in the gray storm light, a multi-headed beast. Desperate cries echoed off the glass.
Roz barked from produce. “Shel! Get the doors open!”
“They’re jammed,” he called back.
“There’s a latch!” Randy shouted, but no one heard them.
“Force them,” Roz shouted. “Now!”
Shel reluctantly shoved his way through the crowd before Randy could get there and pried the doors open far enough to force his thick shoulder between them and keep pushing. Hands grabbed the edges of the door around him, horrifying and chaotic, and in a split second Shel’s strained face gave way to shock as he vaulted forward, customers pushing their way out. For a terrifying moment Randy thought Shel was going to be trampled, but he flailed and stayed on his feet, pushed all the way to the cart corral at the edge of the patio, instantly drenched.
Randy forgot all about the money and ran.
“Hey Randy, this woman’s looking for vegan cookie dough like it’s going to save her marriage.”
“Won’t have any until Tuesday.”
“Do we have any more bread anywhere? I can’t find Roz.”
“Nope. Out of bread. There was a bag of sprouted English muffins in frozen half an hour ago and that was it.”
The door to the dairy fridge opened and closed again and again. Hala, Naomi, Zoey, Zach, Gracie, Robyn, Flora, Carl, Reggie. A carousel of questions. They had nothing. Two cartons of eggs, half of them broken. Some tofu noodles. Yogurt. Randy sweated through the cold, slicing open boxes and tearing thin cardboard, filling the case from behind with what little was left. Clipped customer voices came through from the other side of the dairy case, anxious and in a hurry, their fingers grabbing at the remaining goods like zombies. Randy slid a container of chocolate yogurt forward and someone yelped at the dead space come alive.
In their eighteen years at the Co-op, they’d seen storm surges like this, and holiday blitzes that stripped them down to their floor tile. But it had been a while. The holidays weren’t as big as they used to be. The staff wasn’t ready for it. Randy’s knees weren’t equipped for it, either. Eight hours on their feet felt different at fifty than it had at thirty-two. They couldn’t run as fast at the softball games. Zach had moved them to the pitcher’s mound this season.
Randy tied up flattened boxes with twine, stepped out of the fridge into the stockroom where the wifi was better. Devastating photos of Houston scrolled beneath their thumb. The Red Cross preparing beds for refugees at the convention center downtown. Funnel clouds sighted in north Austin. The winds were stronger in Central Texas than anyone predicted. Randy worried about Arkansas, if their sisters were listening for tornado sirens. If their boyfriends were around to board up the windows.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Hala slammed through the swinging doors, pushing the mop bucket ahead of her. “I need a fucking shower after that bathroom. Like seriously, what is wrong with people?” Randy took the bucket, squeezed the mop dry, dumped the gray water. Hala pulled out her phone. “My boyfriend is freaking. He’s in one of those new buildings on Riverside? Eighth floor, but still. Said the river’s crazy high.” Randy didn’t remember this boyfriend’s name. Hala had a new one every other week, some hipster covered in tattoos who bought kombucha with her discount. She met them all at shows, the backs of her hands stamped by a dozen clubs. She worked doors and barbacked as a side gig to make rent.
“They’ve got to be closing the bridges any minute,” Randy said. Their phone buzzed. Tonight’s date. I guess we should probably cancel, huh? Take a rain check lol. It had taken three days of bullshitting about Game of Thrones to find an opening to ask this person out. The girl had just broken up with someone. Randy was fine with being a rebound. It was kind of ideal, all of the fire and fury with none of the wedding bells, but the girl was skittish. They sent a thumbs up, Some other time! One more stranger returned to the ether.
Gracie pushed through the doors, panting, bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat. “Chips, pretzels, we got anything?”
“Just the gluten-free.” Randy helped her pull down boxes, eye-level with the dark circles in the armpits of her Mellow Mushroom t-shirt. Gracie moved from San Antonio a few years ago, taking what she thought was only a semester off from Texas State to regroup and focus on her art. That was the way it happened. Randy had thought they were taking a break from restaurant life when they got here, giving themselves a job with a slower pace while they got sober and figured things out, and then suddenly, bam, there they were, blowing out fifty candles on a day-old cake Gracie and Shel smuggled out of bakery shrink. Still at the Co-op.
They followed Gracie into the clogged chip aisle carrying a box of seaweed-flavored rice puffs. “I’ll be in Produce if you need me. Remember to drink water. And eat something, okay? I have some tofu dogs in the fridge, if you need them.” She gave a thumbs up.
Randy filled up the apples, straightened the bell peppers, swapped out the bucket taking the leak in the kitchen. The roof was a mess. Just like the dim stock room that needed a new lighting system, sockets permanently blown out, the shelves rigged to the wall with amateur anchors. The committee was keeping a list.
They faced the cheeses, moved all the way over by wine, Roz’s brilliant idea. If anyone had bothered to ask Randy, they would have moved the hummus and tempeh over there, kept the cheese with the yogurt. None of the staff had any input about changes. This was also on the list.
“Yo.” Zach sailed by, his banana-yellow hair flapping. “Help me with beer?”
Randy followed him into the stock room, loaded up the hand truck with the shitty wheel, and steered the last of their canned IPA out to the floor. “My dad just texted,” Zach said, stacking bright blue cases of six packs chest-high. “They closed all their shops. Sent everyone home.” Zach was heir to a juice bar franchise he didn’t want. His father showed up at the Co-op every once in a while in Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, his bright red face beaming as he handed his son liquefied carrots and sugary smoothies Zach either trashed or gave to Zoey, who came up behind them now, her flamingo pink hair yanked into a high ponytail. They had done their dye jobs at home together, coming in last week with pink and yellow palms and still claiming they weren’t fucking.
None of Randy’s coworkers were aware of how often their story lines repeated, how the scripts were ingrained in the aisles and end caps. This one would sleep with that one. This one would be a klepto and get caught. That one would always leave half-eaten food at a register. These two would become roommates. These two would be frenemies. They would all go out and get drunk together after work, forge friendships and become fuck buddies, complain about the pay and swear for months that they were leaving until they finally did, the players turning over month after month, year after year, but the drama remaining the same, like a soap opera that had been on so long, the writers repeated the plot twists and no one noticed. Randy loved it. They all papered over one another, a continuum of Co-op worker that kept the whole messy operation alive. Randy felt lucky to be part of it. Life could have turned out a lot worse.
“The Mayor’s telling everyone to close,” Zoey said.
“Stock room.” Randy flattened beer boxes as Zach grabbed the hand truck. Gracie was back there with Hala, and Molly now, too. Together, they were half of the committee running administration for the Guadalupe Street Co-op Employee Collective for Fair and Sustainable Working Conditions. It was a mouthful. Randy only said the name out loud at meetings.
“Hey.” Randy nodded at Molly, their work wife—though they wouldn’t say that in anyone’s earshot. Not since the holiday party. “So much for a day off, huh?”
Molly twisted her long, brassy red hair into a knot. “Is anyone surprised?”
“The Mayor’s telling all non-essential businesses to close,” Zoey said. She looked up from her phone, the thick black liner on her eyes smudged, a trail of pretty soft pink glitter floating from the corners of her lashes. Zoey had booked it out of her rural Missouri town in the middle of the night with a duffel bag and a ride from someone she met on Craigslist. She’d been eighteen, leaving a community of Latter Day Saints. Randy hadn’t had the courage to leave their own truck-stop town until their mid-twenties, tired of watching their sisters stumble in from their first marriages whenever they felt like it, drunk with threats of divorce on a Tuesday night. Zoey was the one always inviting everyone to fundraisers and protests and packing her bag full of shrink to pass out to people in encampments by the interstate. She was the first one Randy talked to last year about organizing, after the produce manager quit and Shel was given his job but not his title or pay. She’d lit up like Randy invented a new Christmas.
“Are we essential?” Hala asked, still squinting at her phone.
They stood in a circle reading the same alerts. “We should close,” Randy said, because everyone was waiting for them to say something.
“Who wants to talk to Roz and Kevin?” Gracie asked. Everyone looked at Randy.
“I got it,” Randy said. It was why they were president. They weren’t afraid of Roz. “Listen, a pack of tofu dogs split open. They’re in the fridge. Make sure y’all eat today.”
“I’ll come with you,” Zoey said.
Randy paused. “Let’s not gang up on her. Let me try first.”
“Solve it with a secret middle-aged handshake?” Zoey muttered. Randy pushed out onto the floor, pretending not to hear.
None of them were afraid of Roz, really. But she was the boss and people avoided her. Randy had been at the Co-op eight years when Roz clocked in for the first time. She’d been an instant star, moving her line faster than the others, never making mistakes with the credit card machine. A queer person at a time when the only queers on staff were Randy, Eleanor, and an undergrad who got fired for making out with his boyfriend on the patio when he was supposed to be clearing trash. Roz’s arrival had felt like a moment.
They shouldered their way through the crowd swarming the hot and cold bars, past the cold drinks case and the rack of Fair Trade socks, and found Roz in the office with her phone in her hand, stalking her ex-wife. Again.
“Are you seeing what the Mayor’s saying?”
Roz looked up, surprised, and slid her phone in her pocket. The divorce had been seismic. Five years ago? Four? The only time Randy could remember Roz calling out sick. Roz and Randy had never been close. She used to smile at stories of Randy’s dating misadventures, but offered no comment. Afraid, maybe, that Randy’s singleness would infiltrate her partnered domesticity, slide the wedding band right off her finger. By the time the divorce papers arrived, Roz had jumped Randy for the Floor Manager position, even though Randy had seniority and Roz knew they wanted it. Queerness turned out not to be so much of a bond after all.
“I’m tracking the weather,” Roz said.
“What’s Eleanor say?”
Roz squeezed the back of her neck. She could make their case with Eleanor about all kinds of things, if she wanted, but Roz was afraid of her. It was her marriage all over again. Roz lost her bark around a certain kind of woman, wagged her tail and chased their ball like an obedient puppy desperate for a pat on the head.
“We’re holding course,” Roz said. Her deodorant was pungent, the new Tom’s sea breeze scent. She smelled like a clam bar.
“It’s supposed to get worse before it gets better. We might only have a small window to get everyone home. We should close.”
“That isn’t prudent.”
“Dude, come on. Look out the window.”
Roz shook her head. Randy caught the darting worry in her eyes, the uncertainty. Pity slithered through the cracks of their resolve. Her puppet role between owner and staff was designed for impotent enforcement of Eleanor’s whims. She knew it, they all knew it. It was painful to watch. “Cover Naomi, please, so she can post to socials that we’re open. Reg four.”
When Eleanor made them Dairy Manager almost a decade ago, Randy had prided themselves on negotiating one important detail: they would never run a cash register again. But as staff shrunk and sales tightened, no one had just one job anymore. With years of catch-all Co-op work under their belt, Randy was the most versatile among them. And so they were in a particularly ready position to get hosed.
Randy stuffed their vest and flannel under the register, their nametag hitting the chest of their Hobbit t-shirt. “Next!”
But they weren’t without recourse. The committee had talked to all of their coworkers and they finally had nearly all of the signatures they needed on the petition—at least thirty percent of the staff—to file with the National Labor Board to hold a vote to join union OPEIU Local 199. A vote they would win, easily. Better pay, real benefits, clear job descriptions, and actual staff input into how the place was run. That was all they wanted. The city was changing. Randy’s rent was going up, by a lot. The Co-op had to change, too.
Randy scanned a dozen boxes of pasta and ten cans of beans, jars of tomato sauce, the little tofu boxes that didn’t need to be refrigerated. They pitched the spiel about becoming a Co-op member, one hundred bucks a year and you got special sales and the idea that you supported your community without having to actually do anything but buy groceries. They weren’t that kind of Co-op where people volunteered. All members had to do was shop.
The last can of adzuki beans blipped across the scanner and all of the lights blinked, the screen winked. The man in front of Randy whipped his head around as though he might catch the culprit who flipped the light switch. “It happens,” Randy said. “Okay, that’ll be one-ninety-four-thirty-two.”
Darkness dropped across the store. A sharp moment of stunned silence engulfed them. No music, no beeping computers, no running refrigerators.
“We’ve got a backup generator!” Roz called. “Everyone hang tight!”
Scared chatter erupted. A customer abandoned a cart in Randy’s line, then another, each of them following like sheep. Randy whipped around, looking for Molly. She was in the kitchen alone. There were no windows back there. It would be pitch black. Randy squeezed the metal edge of the checkout. They couldn’t leave their drawer unattended.
Tiny lights popped from the tops of phones. Blue-lit faces floated above screens, scrolling for information. There was the crunch of chips and crackers among those who held their place, the noise of hands rooting in cereal boxes, of puffy sealed bags releasing their pressure to the thick air. The minute a system broke down, it was a free-for-all.
Customers rushed the front doors, frantically waving their hands at the dead sensor, their mass forming a grainy silhouette in the gray storm light, a multi-headed beast. Desperate cries echoed off the glass.
Roz barked from produce. “Shel! Get the doors open!”
“They’re jammed,” he called back.
“There’s a latch!” Randy shouted, but no one heard them.
“Force them,” Roz shouted. “Now!”
Shel reluctantly shoved his way through the crowd before Randy could get there and pried the doors open far enough to force his thick shoulder between them and keep pushing. Hands grabbed the edges of the door around him, horrifying and chaotic, and in a split second Shel’s strained face gave way to shock as he vaulted forward, customers pushing their way out. For a terrifying moment Randy thought Shel was going to be trampled, but he flailed and stayed on his feet, pushed all the way to the cart corral at the edge of the patio, instantly drenched.
Randy forgot all about the money and ran.
From Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach, to be published in spring 2026 by the University of Iowa Press. © 2026 by Jules Wernersbach. Used with permission. All rights reserved.