By 10:00 a.m., my head was pounding. I stood in the back office, rubbing my temples, while the screen in front of me flickered—blank again.
The fruit delivery details hadn't been entered. Not the Bartlett pears, not the raspberries, not even the crates of strawberries I'd personally approved when they arrived Saturday afternoon.
Ashley sat on a swivel stool across from me, scrolling through her phone as if we were waiting for our fingernails to dry instead of preparing for a three-day jam-making schedule.
I exhaled slowly. "Ashley, you didn't enter the fruit delivery."
She looked up, chewing gum as if it were a performance. "Huh? Deliveries?"
"Delivers," I repeated. “You signed for receipt. The crates are in the cold store, but they’re not in the system. That means they’re not included in production, which means if we run the batch without updating, it will disrupt the weight balance and expiration forecasts.”
Ashley blinked. “Oh. Right. I was supposed to do that. I just couldn’t figure out how to access the form.”
“You just double-click the template and enter the weight. That’s it.”
She shrugged, unimpressed. “I’m just not technical.”
A tiny vein flickered in my temple. I turned the monitor toward her.
“Ashley, you’re the production manager. Entering inventory is the bare minimum of your job.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” she hissed, straightening up.
“I’ve been here every day and every night,” I retorted, “finishing what you start and what you leave behind.”
Silence hung between us. She looked away first, muttering something under her breath, then pulled out her phone again.
I stared at the blank form on the screen. My hands hovered over the keyboard.
I shouldn't have to do this for her. She should learn, right?
"If you care so much," Dad said, "then teach her."
But that wasn't the point. He hadn't appointed me as her mentor. He'd shifted his responsibility and hoped I'd pick her up, like I always did.
I glanced toward the door. Dad had been away all morning at a supplier meeting. Mom was up front, labeling jars.
No one would have noticed if this data had never been entered—except the USDA, auditors, and stores that relied on clean records.
And they would never forgive me.
So I started writing, slowly at first. Then, with the familiar skill of someone who'd done this thanklessly for years, I entered the strawberries, marked the Bartlett pears, added ripeness codes for the raspberries. I checked invoices, verified the number of crates, and adjusted the arrival times on the delivery manifest.
By the time I finished, my tea had gone cold and Ashley had left the room.
The pain in my neck was now sharp, radiating down between my shoulder blades.
I straightened my arms, stood up, and went to the cold room to check the shelf alignment for the third time.
The labels were wrong. The crates of raspberries had been stacked above the pears, violating our storage protocol because pears bruise more easily.
I corrected that too.
By lunchtime, I was exhausted, and no one had thanked me. No one even knew.
In the break room, Ashley was laughing with her mom about something on her phone, and I sat in the corner, eating leftover pasta from a Tupperware container like a ghost in my own life.
Micah wrote: How's it going? Bringing meals?
Jam or wine?
I smiled at the screen—my first real smile of the day.
No meals needed, but maybe wine. And maybe don't ask how it's going.
He sucked out a heart and a jam jar emoji.
I looked around at the women I'd shared blood with and wondered how something so simple—being noticed, appreciated—could be a foreign language here.
My jars were now on someone else's shelf. A stranger who had chosen me.
And here I couldn't even get my sister to learn a spreadsheet.
Wednesday arrived like a storm without warning—no thunder, no clouds—just a bolt of lightning straight down my spine.
I was in the middle of updating my monthly performance report, hunched over my laptop, back in the back room, sipping a tart gas station coffee. The room was hot and quiet, the only sounds being the soft hum of the small refrigerator and the occasional clatter of crates on the production floor.
My eyelids felt like sandpaper.
The night before, I'd stayed up until 2:00 a.m. fixing Ashley's mislabeled lids. She'd labeled half the strawberry jam as raspberry. If I hadn't noticed in time, it would have gone to market mislabeled. Such a mistake could destroy a relationship with a supplier in a heartbeat.
I wrote on the spreadsheet and rubbed my temples.
Then the door burst open.
Everett burst in as if he were still twenty-five and full of backroom fury. He threw the folder on the desk so hard that it shifted and hit the keyboard.
“Your numbers are sloppy,” he growled. “This whole month has been a disaster. We can’t afford your laziness.”
The room shrank around me. I looked at the folder.
“What numbers?”
“Pear yield. You’re missing a whole case from your report. It’s distorting the batch cost, Dana. The books are falling apart.”
My
