The most important thing in the store isn't for sale.
Alex Turner is $16,737 in debt the morning he drives his dead father's car to a new store. The seat is still set for someone taller. In the glove compartment is a notebook his father kept, and one line he can't shake: Too busy fighting. Love him. Don't know how to say it right.
On his first day as an assistant manager at a big-box store in Buffalo, his new boss opens a desk drawer and hands him a notebook. Same size. Same soft cover. Almost identical. Joe Abbott doesn't give answers. He gives questions, time, and the same handful of ideas he's offered people for years—most of which end up in a drawer.
Alex isn't ready to hear any of it. He's just finally out of ways to keep bracing.
Over the next six months, through freight and Black Friday and people at the end of their patience, he learns to find the half-second between what happens to him and what he does next. Slowly, badly, and in public — in front of a stocker who hides behind policy and a coworker who has learned to brace before anyone speaks to her. Joe is sick. The store can feel it. He never says the word.
There's no revelation here. There's a bad year, a notebook, and a slow-moving truck on a two-lane road that Alex meets four different ways.
Six months later, nothing has changed—and everything has.
For readers of Fredrik Backman and Rachel Joyce.
