Chapter 24
On Friday morning, KJ was in the stockroom, opening boxes of new merchandise. He’d been working for two weeks and was astonished by how much there was of it, and how fast it sold in the Saint’s pro shop.
He scored the flaps of a cardboard carton with a box cutter and lifted out the packing slip, indicating the shipment contained sweaters from a company called Suki Smith. Inside were layers and layers of cellophane bags. He opened the first bag and out slid six women’s cashmere sweaters. They were impossibly soft to the touch and in a rainbow of vibrant and pastel hues. He set them on the table and opened the next bag, and then the next.
When he’d emptied all the boxes, he went back over the packing slip with a yellow highlighter, marking off each of the items in the shipment. When he got to the description of the sweaters, he had to force himself to slow down and concentrate. Each color had a different name and style number and price. There were V-neck sweaters and button-down cardigans and half-zips and mock turtlenecks. Who knew that many kinds of sweaters existed?
And the colors. Jadeite. Hibiscus. Orchid. Azure. Cerise. Pearl. What the hell?
Also, the numbers seemed to be off. According to the packing list, he should have unpacked two bags of each color and style of sweater, which would have made for 144 sweaters. But he only counted 120. He recounted and the number came out the same.
Marcie, the shop manager, had given him a sheet of the shop’s computer-generated price tags and the pricing gun. He stuck the gun in the back pocket of his carefully pressed logo shorts. The clothes were definitely a perk of the job. Marcie had stressed that he wear the shop’s clothes every day when he reported to work. And he had to be carefully groomed, she’d warned, looking him up and down that first day.
“Trim up those sideburns, get rid of the five-o’clock shadow, and don’t let me see you in here looking wrinkled or messy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a walking mannequin. We want our customers to want to look like you. Understand?”
He found her behind the cash register, chatting with a woman who was asking questions about golf shorts for her son. He waited until the customer had wandered away. “Hey, uh, Marcie. You know those Suki Smith cashmere sweaters?”
She was sorting through a stack of the previous day’s receipts. “What about them?”
He showed her the packing list. “I don’t understand these color names. Like, what’s ‘cerise’ and also, ‘azure’ and ‘pearl’?”
She glanced at the list. “Don’t they teach vocabulary at that high-priced college of yours? Cerise is like a pinky-purple. Azure is blue. Pearl is off-white. Orchid is light purple.”
He laughed. “Why can’t they just call it those colors? Why have tricky names?”
“Because those sweaters retail for just over a grand apiece,” she said. “People don’t want to pay that kind of money for a plain green sweater. So it’s called jadeite. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She looked annoyed when he didn’t leave. “Anything else?”
“Well, yeah. The packing list says we should have received one hundred forty-four sweaters, but I counted. Twice. And it looks to me like we only got one hundred and twenty. You want me to call the company?”
Marcie plucked the packing list from his hand and lowered her voice. “You just leave that to me. Get the sweaters priced and put them out here on that front table. And be quick about it, because I need to run an errand and I can’t leave the shop while you stand around in the stockroom with your thumb up your ass.”
“Bitch,” he said, under his breath, when she hurried from the pro shop. Marcie was sweet as pie with the customers, to whom she brazenly sucked up at every opportunity. But when they were alone in the boutique, she was a pint-sized Mussolini.
Barely five feet tall in her stylish wedge-heeled sandals, Marcie had a set of boobs that, even to KJ, did not look like original factory equipment. He marveled that she was able to stand upright. But right from the start, he could tell his boss had it in for him.
Take today. He spent the rest of the shift hustling, keeping all the displays neat and restocked, writing up reorders and ringing up customers. It had been a productive day. He’d sold a hella lot of logo shirts, windbreakers, and even an entire set of golf clubs—to the tune of $3,200. But every time he looked up, he caught his manager giving him the stink-eye.
He wondered what he’d done to earn her wrath today. Finally, ten minutes before closing time, she approached a father-son duo who’d been perusing a rack of last season’s marked-down winter jackets.
“Sorry, folks,” she said. “But we’re closing a little early tonight to do inventory.”
As soon as they were gone, Marcie locked the plate-glass door. She turned to KJ.
“I need to speak to you in the stockroom.”
He followed her into the stockroom with dread in his heart. What now?
She leaned against the pricing table in the center of the crowded room and pointed a finger at him, her voice shaking with barely suppressed rage. “First off, don’t you ever dare question me about inventory issues while we have guests in the shop.”
“Oh. Okay,” KJ said eagerly. “Sorry. I just—”
She raised her hand, palm out, like a traffic cop, to stop him.
“Second. You should know that from the beginning, I was against having you work here. I thought it was a bad look, hiring a member’s son, but I got overruled. And I’ll admit, until today, I had started to come around. You’re attractive, our guests seem to like you, and you seem to have a knack for the upsell.”
“Oh, uh, thanks. I think?”
Marcie had explained the art of upselling on his first day of work.
“Say you sell a pair of golf cleats. That’s a nice sale, right? Couple hundred bucks. But it’s not enough. Here’s what you do. You show the customer one of our custom-designed imported leather belts with the Saint logo. That’s a hundred twenty-five. You ask how he’s fixed for socks. No man has ever had enough socks. He’ll need one of our shoe totes too, to keep the cleats from getting dinged up. Then you show him the shirt selection. Tell him they just came in today and they’re flying out the door. Create a sense of urgency. And mention that if he buys two, he’s going to get one of our awesome stainless steel insulated travel coffee mugs. Thirty-dollar value.”
KJ had nodded enthusiastically, taking it all in, the way he’d never absorbed anything taught in his boring college classes.
“It’s like a game, see,” Marcie explained. “And now, you’ve taken a simple hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar purchase and upsold it to an easy six hundred dollars’ worth of add-ons. If you’ve done it correctly, your customer is going to actually be grateful for the chance to spend more money. And that, my friend, is called the upsell.”
Now KJ was watching Marcie’s face, waiting for the ax to fall.
He didn’t have to wait long. She raised a finger. “You need to understand, what goes on in this shop stays in this shop. Right?”
He was still puzzled. “I’m sorry. I don’t get it. If you’re mad about the sweaters, I counted them twice. I just thought you’d want to know we were missing a couple dozen. Because of how expensive they are and all. I wanted you to know…”
Her eyes narrowed. “So now I know, and that’s the end of this discussion.”
KJ nodded that he understood. He looked around for his messenger bag, getting ready to leave, but Marcie wasn’t finished.
“And KJ?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Since we’re letting each other know about stuff, I should let you know that I saw you, Tuesday night, leaving the Back Porch.”
He could feel the ice in his veins and the heat rising in his face. He forced himself to give her the patented dumb jock face he’d perfected over the years.
“Back Porch? Must have been somebody else. I’ve never heard of it. Never been there.”
She chuckled. “Oh, sweetie. It was you, all right. You had a ball cap pulled down over your face, but I recognized your walk. The slight limp when you favor your bad knee. And your shoes.”
Marcie pointed at the shoes he was wearing today. His favorites. The neon-gold-and-black Nikes with the Demon Deacon logo. “Pro tip, KJ. If you’re trolling a gay bar and you want to be incognito, go for something a little more understated.”
He was staring down at the damned shoes. Frozen in his tracks. When he looked up at her, he felt like he might puke.
“Don’t worry, hon,” she purred. “Your little secret is safe with me. I don’t judge. But your folks might. And your granddaddy? I know the man. He’d definitely judge, and I’m thinking he wouldn’t like knowing his grandson and namesake was a sneaky little queer.”