MANAGERIAL DUTIES - Short Story

Author's Note: Another retired short story! As always, short stories are not really my forte but I sure do try. This one, I'm pretty sure, was written to be submitted to The First Line and, obviously, they didn't take. 

            Frank Rooney had been the manager of the Shop & Save for thirty-eight years, and he wasn’t retiring any time soon. This was a problem for the rest of us, especially me—for the past four years, I’d been doing his work for him. I’d been doing the scheduling, I’d been coming to the front when annoyed soccer moms asked one of the terrified part-time high school workers to “see a manager now, please”, and all Frank did at this point was sleep in his office. I still don’t know how I managed to get the lucky job of doing literally all of his work, still at my barely-over-minimum-wage pay of eight dollars an hour, but every time I bring it up Lily and the other older, more seasoned workers laugh at me and tell me it’s because I’m young. Which makes even less sense, but I can never get a straight answer out of them.

            But either way, it pissed me off before I really learned the truth.

            Frank Rooney was totally, definitely, completely fucking off the deep end. He had dementia, or Alzheimer’s, if they’re different, he had one of them. He wasn’t even that old (I figure; I don’t even know how old he is) when he started doing this. My first year working at the Shop & Save full time, that first year after I’d sort of flunked out of college after trying for an accounting degree, he was a normal dude. A normal, kind of out-of-it, old dude. And then he’d start asking me to come into his office after my shifts and pepper me with questions like, who worked best together, who worked best when, if I’d just do the schedule, please. And I did it. It was my first year on the job. But then I slowly started taking over his other duties, because when annoyed soccer moms yelled that they wanted to see a manager and tottering old Frank came up, they got that gleam in their eye, that, “Oh, I’m going to be able to get some free shit from this sucker” gleam, and I didn’t like seeing him all taken advantage of like that. So I said I’d take care of it, and maybe it’s my fault that I ended up taking on so goddam much, because eventually he just stopped coming out of his office. He’d come in at eight in the morning, an hour before opening, and he’d leave at ten, an hour after closing, and he’d just fucking nap the entire time between. I had to wake him up a couple times, a couple of times if I had night shifts and a couple times if, the next morning, I found that he was still there.

            But the day I found out that he was totally fucking off the deep end was the day I felt like shit about how I felt about him, how I talked about him to the other guys who worked there, to Brandon-who-always-smelled-like-pot and Brent-who-was-definitely-going-to-be-a-frat-boy.

            It was lunch. On the days I worked full days, which were becoming so frequent that I was nearing overtime, I’d started taking a full hour for lunch. Who the hell cared, right? I was, for all intents and purposes, the manager now, I could take two hours for lunch if I wanted. I headed up to Frank’s office, because that’s where the minifridge was and I’d brought a sandwich that had to stay cold, and anyway, someone (I figured Brent) thought it was funny to take my food if I left it in the break room, and opened the door on Frank crying and gibbering and when I walked through the door he looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life.

            “Boy,” he said. “You, boy—what’s going on?”

            “You OK, Frank?” I asked, even though I, a lowly college drop-out, could see that he was definitely not OK. But I didn’t want to deal with Crazy Frank, I already had to deal with Befuddled Frank most of the time, and I was hungry. “Gonna slide past you and grab my lunch, if that’s cool—“

            He grabbed my wrist then, but it wasn’t a strong grip by any means. It was more clutching, like he’d die if he didn’t get those flabby fingers around my (admittedly, growing flabby) forearm. I could smell something a little funky—later I realized, when taking a dump of my own, that he’d shit himself. “Please.”

            I didn’t know what to do then, so I called the hospital. I already knew that he didn’t have any family; his wife was long-dead and they hadn’t had any kids. So I called the hospital, because he looked certifiably insane, and they came and they took him away and I played manager until closing. The next day he didn’t show, and I guess I thought this would happen, because I went in before opening even though I wasn’t scheduled until three. Lily, who’d probably been around about as long as Frank but didn’t show any adverse effects, raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re not scheduled until three.”

            “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Is Frank here?”

            “No,” Lily said. She shook her head after a moment’s pause, like I was deaf or something. “Hospital… I checked with them last night. Worries a soul when someone they’ve known for years gets carted off in an ambulance, you know? They think there’s something wrong with his head. God, but he’s got nothing. That salary he makes… I don’t know how he stays alive at home, if he remembers to eat, but he must… kid, if we can, we’ve gotta keep him top dog.”

            The hospital released him later that day. They called the store. I picked up the phone, and I picked up the boss—and brought him straight back to work. I didn’t want him driving after that, so at the end of the day, I drove him home. His house was in chaos, to put it lightly, so I put him on the couch, turned on some old Western he seemed to enjoy, and I set about cleaning up the place. He didn’t go to sleep (and why would he—he slept enough during the day!), so I stayed up with him, made him something to eat, and even though now I don’t get near enough sleep, I end up doing his job at work and taking care of him at his place. I’ve moved in. Don’t have to pay rent anymore, which is nice.

            Still, it would be so much better for all of us if he’d just retire already. Lily won’t let me do it, and I don’t think I’d be able to do it if it was just up to me, anyway.