Epistemology, Barry Rachin [classic novels to read .TXT] 📗

Ronda Wickford, assistant manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart, located Scotty Bergeron over by the leafy green vegetables filling a bin of baby carrots. “I need someone to run produce.” Scotty continued to spread the individual packages in the refrigerated case. A stocky middle-aged man, his dirty brown hair was still thick but fading to gray at the temples. “There’s a generous bump in salary plus benefits,” Rhonda added.
What she didn’t bother mentioning was that, choking back a fistful of tears, the current produce manager’s wife called the previous afternoon to say her husband had been on a bender since the third week in November. Soused. Blotto. Bombed. Plastered. Four sheets to the wind. A distraught family was trying to coax Donovan O’Brien into rehab. Was it rehab or detox? Ronda couldn’t recall. And this wasn’t the first time; the hard-drinking employee had fallen off the wagon twice before.
Scotty stared at her with a blank expression. “Dewey’s next in line for the job. He’s got seniority and – ”
“Dewey Epstein’s a halfwit who couldn’t tie his shoelaces without a training manual much less manage a produce department.” Rhonda lowered her voice a handful of decibels. “More to the point, since Donovan hit the skids, you’ve been doing three-quarters of his work and all of your own. Anyone with half a brain can see that.”
After Supersaver went union in the early nineteen sixties, it was harder to get rid of troublesome employees like Donovan O’Brien. Worse yet, the change sometimes afforded habitually lazy or unqualified workers leverage when a plum position came available. But Ronda possessed considerable leverage of her own in this particular instance. She wanted to sack Donovan over a month earlier, but the union representative begged her to hold off. He was going to straighten things out with the irascible Irishman, help him put his pathetic life back together. Think wonders. Shit blunders.
Pulling a box cutter out of a back pocket, Scotty slit the tape on a second carton of carrots. He glanced up but only for a split second without bothering to make eye contact. “Yes, I’ll take the job. When do I start?”
“Yesterday morning. I’m making it retroactive to the beginning of the week,” she replied and walked off.


Back in the main office Rhonda told Marna, who handled personnel, to upgrade Scotty to the new position. “Something funny?”
“A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. That’s got to be a first for the market.”
“I thought he worked maintenance at some community college in Minnesota,” Ronda replied. She slid into a swivel chair and fired up the Windows Vista program. “He was a custodian. Twenty-six years.”
“I cleared the references when Scotty applied,” Marna replied, “the man was chairman of the philosophy department at Rutland Community College.”
Ronda watched the computer screen come to life, fleshing itself out with a dozen colorful program icons. Clicking on the Microsoft Excel tab, the circular bluish mouse symbol pulsated, waiting for the spreadsheet to load.
A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts. Something had gone haywire. A stickler for details, Ronda would never just assume Scotty was a blue collar stiff. She brought up the accounts receivable invoices and started analyzing expenditures by departments.
Wait a minute! Now she remembered - a trivial incident. The day before Thanksgiving Ronda ran into the new produce manager sipping coffee in the employee lounge. “What a waste,” Scotty muttered.
“Excuse me?” She hadn’t spoken and had no idea what he was referring to. The man gestured toward an electrician in blue coveralls removing a fluorescent light fixture from the dropped ceiling grid. “If it was just a dead bulb, we’d replaced it,” Ronda replied, “but the whole unit’s shot.”
“Yes, but do you see the round compartment in the center of the fixture?” Ronda squinted at the light just as the workman pulled the aluminum housing free of the ceiling, lowering the bulky unit to a second worker standing beside the ladder. “There’s a small ballast resistor that controls the individual lights behind that plate. All the electrician had to do was replace the part, rewire a handful of connections and the light would operate good as new.” Scotty broke a piece off an apple Danish and washed the sticky dough down with a mouthful of coffee. “Now the store has to junk all that perfectly good metal and spend additional money on a replacement.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Ronda mused. What she opted not to mention was how many thousands of dollars corporate bigwigs routinely threw away on lavish perks and sublime foolishness. She considered herself fairly thick-skinned, but some of the extravagance made her want to retch.
That brief conversation in the employee lounge - yes, that was where she got the cockamamie notion Scotty was the hands-on type rather than an academic. Half an hour later, Marna left to deliver a box of gift cards to customer service. When she was gone, Ronda hurried over to the file cabinet. Fishing through a stack of manila folders, she found what she was looking for:

Scott B. Bergeron age 58.
Chairman of the philosophy department
Rutland Community College, Rutland Minnesota.
Marital Status: widowed.
Children: two.

Ronda skimmed through the references, all glowing tributes to a dedicated academic and educator.
A young Hispanic woman with a spidery hairnet covering her black curls knocked lightly and stuck her head in the door. Ronda crammed the file back in the drawer and slammed the cabinet shut. “Yes, Miriam?”

* * * *

Later that night at home Ronda tried to make sense out of fragments of reliable information, hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo she had puzzled together over the previous year regarding the taciturn enigma she had just promoted.
Widowed with two children. The wife was dead. Was it an accident, chronic illness, stroke or fatal heart attack? No one at the market had any right asking what happened. There but for the grace of God… Of course the children would be young adults now. And that business with the ballast resistor – if the man was previously married and paying a mortgage on his own place, he probably took more than just a passing interest in home repairs.
But why would a well-educated person moved half way across the country to end up at an entry level position in a supermarket? A college professor no less! The Supersaver routinely employed retirees to bag groceries, run down errant shopping carts in the parking lot and fulfill other menial positions, but this guy didn’t fit the mold. At fifty-eight he was far too young – too young by a dozen years – to be working for a few lousy bucks over minimum wage, padding a monthly social security check.
And his body language was all wrong. The tight-lipped fellow with the limpid hazel eyes that never quite settled on you for more than a fleeting millisecond, was infuriatingly disengaged. Detached from all the incestuous intrigues and petty bickering endemic to such workplaces. Case in point: in November Adrian Peters, a divorcée from bookkeeping with a stunning figure, invited Scotty over to her place for dinner. The guy thanked Adrian profusely but noted a prior commitment. Perhaps he did have some other pressing engagement, but Scotty never bothered to follow up on the hospitality by asking for a rain check.
And regarding their brief exchange earlier in the day, Scotty seemed inconvenienced! The serendipitous promotion to produce manager - it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. If Ronda had suggested, “Why don’t you take my job for the next five years and I’ll price baby carrots and unload tractor trailers full of vegetables,” he might have just grinned foolishly and stared serenely into space. Like some middle-aged Hindu ascetic who renounces all worldly possessions, abandons wife and family to sit lotus style in a mountain cave contemplating his navel, Scotty Bergeron floated through his twilight years in a bland state of cosmic indifference.

The phone rang. “Hello mother.” Ronda slumped down on the living room couch and teased a scrap of lint from her rayon skirt. “That’s very sweet of you, but I’m spending the holidays with friends,” she lied. “Yes, people I know from the market. Thanks for the invite.” She chatted a few minutes longer and lowered the phone back onto the cradle.
Two weeks to Christmas. She had no plans other than to hunker down with a bottle of white wine and the latest Debbie Macomber novel. Ronda was addicted to the knitting series. They were holding the book, which had been out of circulation for weeks, at the front desk of the Brandenberg Public Library.
Last Christmas she was dating someone. That ended badly. Now she was alone and probably better off emotionally. Over the summer, Rhonda had come to the dour conclusion that ‘romance’ was highly overrated. When things turned ugly, people wielded human affection like a lethal weapon. Cupid’s curse – it was an emotion entanglement with potentially homicidal tendencies. What people really needed wasn’t love with all its messy excess baggage but common decency. Better they should skip romance altogether and simply be kind to one another.

What to eat? Ronda shuffled to the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator. As store manager she could purchase the freshest vegetables and prime meat cuts on a daily basis. Instead she bought odds and ends from the deli. A quarter pound of Finlandia cheese. Another quarter pound of Boarshead roast beef. A couple of torpedo rolls from the self-serve bins near the bakery. “Will that be all?” The young girl behind the deli counter flashed Ronda a sick smile. What sort of stingy slob buys their meals in such meager quantities? Answer: dirt-poor loners and romantic losers.
Last Christmas when she was hopelessly enthralled by Mr. Wrong, Ronda cooked a teriyaki pork roast tenderloin. She used the pan drippings for marinade which she brushed over the succulent carrots and potatoes. As a side dish she sliced butternut squash together with baking apples– for tantalizing flavor she always bought braeburn, northern or empire—which she heaped together with brown sugar, cinnamon and cranberries. The aromatic concoction went in the oven along side the pork.
For the piece de resistance, Ronda made a special trip five miles across town to an Italian specialty store where she bought a round loaf of panettone, which she cut up in bite-size chunks. She mixed the sweetbread with raisins and vanilla pudding. Scooping the sticky batter into a Teflon cupcake pan, she set the timer for twenty minutes. When the desert came out of the oven Ronda sprinkled rum over the toasted crust and finished the culinary masterpiece with a dollop of whipped cream - the homemade variety, not from an aerosol can.
That’s how a woman cooked when she was in love. Or imagined she was before the balmy emotions soured, atrophied, shriveled up and blew away in the chilling late December wind, and she was reduced to a quarter-pound of cheese and roast beef.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Later that night in the bathroom the hot water refused to shut completely. Even when she twisted the knob firmly to the left a thin trickle of water dribbled out of the spout. Prying the plastic cap off the top of the knob with a Phillips screwdriver, she loosened the set screw, lifting the handle away altogether.
No luck! Only the metal stem protruded from the chrome housing. The defective washer was buried on the underside of the unit with no apparent access. Replacing the handle,