But Nicole couldn’t explain, not even to Ruby, who was her closest friend at the store. (Never mind that Ruby was forty-­eight, the same age as Nicole’s mom, and of a different race. Who cared? Nicole’s fiancé Marcus was black too.) Still, if she told Ruby how happy leaving Meredith hanging had made her, she’d sound like she needed to get a life.

Potterstown had yet to recover from the departure of IBM, once its largest employer. These days, Potterstown was as much museum as city, its past glory evident less in its people—­many of whom walked around with something of a shell-shocked look, as if modernity itself had caught them unawares—­than in the fine old buildings that had outlived the purposes for which they’d been built. The domed, neoclassical former Potterstown National Bank, for example, was now a struggling coffee shop. A former shirt factory housed an organic bakery called Kneads that was, like the coffee shop, geared toward part-­timers from New York. For most of its full-time residents, Potterstown’s center of gravity had moved from downtown to the surrounding ring of strip malls, in which liquor stores, kidney dialysis centers, dollar stores, cigarette discounters, and military recruitment offices flourished. If it weren’t for the influx of city people each summer, Potterstown would be in far worse straits, like so many of the truly depressed towns farther upstate—­towns that didn’t even have a Walmart, let alone a Town Square; even with the city people, store #1512 was a low-­volume store, a training store, where corporate sent new managers to cut their teeth. The highest-­grossing and most profitable stores—­the ones they sent their best managers to—­were located in places whose fortunes had risen in recent years in inverse proportion to the nation’s Potterstowns. Affluent suburbs, places like Westchester County and northern New Jersey. And Connecticut. West Hartford was the big time.

“It’s not that,” said Milo irritably. (Jokes by people other than himself tended to grate on his nerves.) “Meredith ignores me, and I’m as white as can be.” He held up his arm, as if the others might not have noticed his skin color before now. “She doesn’t even say hello to me. It’s as if I’m not even a person to her, as if the truck just throws itself.”

At this, Milo laughed.

She might once have had other aspirations, but her life had taken a decisive turn when she was seventeen. She had run away from home. For a while, she’d lived in her car. Even after she’d gotten on her feet—­found a job, a place to live—­she had struggled. For years, she had been both depressed and wild, self-­destructive. It wasn’t until Val met Liz in her mid-­twenties that everything changed. In the past five years, Val had gotten married, gotten her GED, had a baby. She’d reconciled with her grandmother—­now she and Liz took care of her and lived in her house. Val even saw her mom sometimes—­without her dad’s knowledge. He was the reason she’d left home in the first place. He was the kind of person who’d get drunk with his buddies and go out to the coop and shoot his own chickens. For fun. He also didn’t like gay people.

He walked by a largely abandoned shopping center from the 1960s with weeds growing through cracks in the parking lot. Land here was so cheap that when a building became outdated, its owners often didn’t bother to tear it down. They just built a new one next door. What’s a half mile of dead space to people in cars?

The irony, she thought as she began to pace, walking parallel to the line, was that until yesterday Little Will’s constant badgering about the backlog had bothered her far more than the thing itself. Unlike unload times, which had to be reported daily, the existence of the backlog was unknown to anyone outside the store. The only way corporate would find out about the backlog was with a surprise site visit. And those were rare. In practice, corporate almost always gave advance notice. On the other hand, managers’ ability to operate within budget was pretty much the most important metric used to evaluate performance and determine raises and promotions. You didn’t have to be a genius to understand that corporate’s willful blindness to conditions in the store, compared with its hyperattentiveness to the budget, was a way of telegraphing to managers what they should prioritize if they wanted to be successful.

After she’d left Town Square yesterday, she had spent hours thinking about the group manager job. If she got it, she’d be able to pay her back bills—­she still owed for heat last winter, among other things. She’d also be able to buy for her son, so he’d be provided for when he got out of prison, ready to make a fresh start, train for a career like he should have done years ago (he was smart, perhaps the smartest of her three kids).

He had nothing against retail in principle. Just Town Square. He despised its ethos of corner-cutting (the Potemkin approach to store maintenance—­cleaning stores only when upper-level visitors were expected—­was a case in point), its willingness to cheat employees in any way that was technically not illegal (and call it “performing its fiduciary duty to stockholders”), its arbitrary rules, such as its insistence that the unload take no more than an hour, regardless of the size of the truck and no matter how little difference it made to finish at 5:01 rather than 5:00. Corporate didn’t trust its own workers, was what it came down to—­the big shots thought that without a hard deadline, its employees wouldn’t work efficiently, which showed just how little corporate understood the people it employed. And then there was Meredith. More than any other executive manager Little Will had ever worked with, she seemed like the walking, talking embodiment of everything he disliked most about Town Square.

Corporate wasn’t playing when it came to unions. The year before, someone in Harvest—­the team responsible for fresh produce and perishables—­was fired for “time theft” after he’d been spotted talking briefly to a union organizer during his shift.

It wasn’t like there was any rush, no matter what her mom said. As Nicole had tried to explain to the union organizer who’d cornered her outside the store a few months ago—­after her shift was over or she’d never have risked talking to him!—­Town Square wasn’t so bad. It was a lot better than the job Nicole had before, in fast food. Her boss was a dirtbag who hit on her all the time, promising to promote her to assistant manager if she’d sleep with him. It was gross—­and more than a little bit scary when she was alone with him. One thing about Town Square was that it didn’t tolerate that kind of shit. (Nicole appreciated Big Will’s thing about keeping his office door open—­it set the right tone.) Really, the worst thing about this job was Meredith, her micromanaging, the constant threat of being written up, her whole irritating energy, the way she ruined their goddamn fucking chill.