Chapter Four
Ryser Cares is a far cry from the towering, eighteen-floor building that houses Ryser’s headquarters in DC. There’s no hustle, no bustle, no Starbucks on the first floor radiating bitter-coffee rejuvenation. Just a sad, square block of concrete at the corner of an abandoned strip mall.
Standing outside my car on Monday morning, I can only stare across the nearly empty parking lot at the gray one-story building that awaits me.
The words RYSER CARES appear above the door in a blocky, outdated font.
My eyes scan the vacant storefronts next to it, superimposing my memories over the emptiness.
The one directly beside Ryser Cares used to be an antique furniture store.
Beside that was the stationery shop where Marina and I used to hunt for unique erasers to add to our collection.
Then there was the fresh foods market that had the good granola you couldn’t find at Food Lion, crunchy and teeming with toasted pecans and pepitas. All of them gone.
A pang runs through me at seeing so much nothing in place of the spots that live on in my memory. But Greenstead has been declining for as long as I can remember. There’s no point in mourning what I’ve always known.
A flicker of movement through the window of Ryser Cares snaps me back to attention. Right. My first day of work in my new role.
I take a steeling breath, grip the strap of my purse, and stalk toward the entrance with purpose.
I get within six feet of the door when a goose pops out from behind a tall planter and makes a beeline for me, flapping its wings and honking menacingly. I let out a yelp and scramble toward my car.
After a pause, I turn around cautiously, my heart still hammering.
The goose stands at the curb, its dark, beady eyes trained on me.
I gather my resolve and take a careful step forward—and then another goose emerges from behind the planter.
This one’s calmer, more assured. Which is somehow even more menacing.
Like it knows precisely how to tear my limbs apart but can’t be bothered just yet.
I reach into my purse. I’m tempted to grab my phone and call out of work for the day, though I have no idea what I would say.
Whining to Amanda that I can’t come in today because of the geese seems counterproductive to my plan.
Plus, if Dan got word of it, he’d take it as more evidence that I’ve lost my mind.
Actually, I don’t even know if Amanda’s the person I would call. She’s not my boss anymore. My new boss is… Well, I don’t know who my new boss is, but I assume it’s someone in that building there. Past the geese. I just need to…get inside.
In all, it takes me twenty minutes to enter the office. I tried a variety of tactics, from slowly stepping forward, to approaching the door at an angle, to finally screeching and making a run for it as both geese nipped at my heels.
Once inside, I slam the door shut. I stand there, breathing raggedly, my purse falling off my shoulder, still gripping the door handle like a lifeline, even though the geese have now smugly sauntered off.
“Can we help you?”
Slowly, I turn. Two men stand at opposite ends of an air hockey table, watching me with apprehension.
One is a Black man in his fifties, with graying beard scruff and a wrinkled Pink Floyd shirt over his faded jeans.
The other looks closer to forty. His dark hair is coiffed and shiny with gel, but he’s also wearing an outfit too casual for the Ryser office, screamingly bright colors that stand out against his brown skin: a tropical shirt in vibrant hues of blue and yellow, and striped yellow-and-orange shorts in a strangely shiny material.
They look like swim trunks. But no one would wear swim trunks to an office. Though it is oddly warm in here.
Now I feel silly for spending half an hour this morning putting together the outfit I thought would help me make a good first impression.
My hand runs to the waistband of my dress pants.
I feel an urge to untuck the hem of my satin blouse, rip off my sensible cardigan, yank the headband off my neatly wrangled curls, not feel like the odd one out five seconds into my new job.
But I fight off the impulse. My hand drops to my side.
I’m here to impress, I remind myself. Not to blend in.
“Are you here to fix the AC?” asks Maybe Swim Trunks.
“No, I…” I scan the office for a sign of Ryser.
It’s an open floor plan, about half a dozen desks scattered throughout.
A blond white woman in her fifties sits at a desk near the back, crocheting a top of some kind while staring at her computer screen.
A Black woman who looks closer to my age perches on a desk by the window, engrossed in her phone.
“I think I have the wrong place,” I conclude.
“I’m looking for Ryser Cares. Have they moved, or—”
“This is Ryser Cares,” the Pink Floyd man confirms. He furrows his brow, taking me in. “And you’re sure you’re not here to fix the AC?”
I shake my head, less an answer to his question and more a sheer inability to process what I’m seeing.
I’ve heard about Ryser Cares all my life.
Ryser ran a local ad here nonstop after the flood, bragging about their efforts to clean up Greenstead, inviting residents to stop by the charity office if they needed anything.
Every Halloween, at least one kid in my class dressed up as the spokesman from the Ryser Cares ad.
All they needed was a blue sweater vest, a bow tie, a pair of khakis, and a broom, and they’d be instantly recognizable.
Ryser Cares hosted food drives every Thanksgiving, charity 5Ks every spring.
Their entire personality as Ryser’s charity division was their devotion to helping Greenstead.
Ryser Cares can’t be…this. An empty office, an air hockey table, stale air, and crocheting? It doesn’t make sense.
“I thought Ryser Cares would be…” I look around again at the sparse office. “Busier.”
“How can we help you, hon?” the crocheter in the back pipes up.
I set my confusion aside and put on my best I-am-a-professional smile. “I’m Lauryn Harper. I was transferred here from DC. You should have gotten an email?”
Maybe Swim Trunks makes a sympathetic noise at the word transferred , while Pink Floyd says, “I haven’t checked my email this week.”
I let out a quiet laugh. But as he keeps looking at me with polite curiosity, it dawns on me that he isn’t joking. My mind returns to its frantic whirring.
“What’d you do?” the woman leaning on her desk asks, finally glancing up from her phone.
She’s dressed casually like the others, in a loose yellow tank dress.
Her microlocs sit in a knot atop her head, gold hoop earrings sparkling.
A plate of what looks like homemade granola bar squares sits on her desk.
“Oh, do you want a date bar?” she asks, following my gaze.
“No. Uh, thank you, though,” I say as Maybe Swim Trunks grabs two. “What do you mean, what did I do?”
“To get transferred .” She raises her eyebrows when she says it, like it’s code for something.
“Oh.” I fiddle with the strap of my purse, straightening it with too much care. “It was just a…misunderstanding.”
This earns a chuckle from her and a full-on guffaw from Pink Floyd. “Misunderstanding, mishap, mistake,” he says. “It’s all the same, in the end.”
That’s not ominous at all.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, for instance…” The woman sets her phone down and swivels to face me. “I used to work in Ryser’s R&D department. I developed a Parmesan ranch salad dressing for our partnership with Kraft. Everyone loved it, it passed all the testing, it hit the shelves, and then…”
“The dressing turned green,” I finish in a murmur.
The details come back to me now: Overnight, the salad dressing transformed from a creamy off-white to an unsettling chartreuse.
Testing revealed that the product’s pH was conducive to bacteria growth—a perfect recipe for botulism.
No one got sick, but Ryser had to do a recall.
Product recalls are fairly common, but this one cost us a partnership.
Our SVP had spent over a year wooing Kraft, periodically giving updates in all-staff meetings about how securing a partnership with Kraft would help us tap into the Cheese Youth market.
And now I come to meet the person responsible for losing it.
“Yep,” she says. “Ryser lost the partnership, and millions of dollars, so…they transferred me to the Flop House. Just like you.”
“No,” I insist. “They didn’t transfer me to the…” I can’t even say it. “This is just temporary. I’m going back.”
“Okay.” She holds up her palms in surrender, then returns to her phone.
I can’t resist asking, “How long ago was that? When you were transferred?”
“About four years ago. Or five.”
The air leaves my lungs. My head swivels to the others in the office, still looking on curiously. “And were you all…transferred? For messing up at Ryser?” When they all nod, I ask, “And you’ve been here ever since?” They nod again.
“My theory is they think we know too much, and that’s why they haven’t fired us,” the crocheter says. “So…they sent us here instead.”
“What do you mean, know too much?”
The crocheter shrugs. “I worked in social media management. I handled a lot of crises Ryser wouldn’t want me talking about.”
The word crises sends a sense of foreboding rippling through me.
I’ve certainly dealt with my fair share of those.
But I don’t belong in the Flop House , as the ex–research specialist so horrifically put it.
I’m not here because of what I know. I’m here because Dan Gorland overreacts to misunderstandings.
I belong in DC. I have work to do there.
An eight-year plan to carry out. A difference to make.
“What else?” I ask.