By Elle Richardson
Art: “Peeling the Eye, Denia, Spain” by Roger Camp

You couldn’t look at Mr. Barrett without feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t just his stooping shoulders, wispy hair, or his old, round glasses. It wasn’t his faded dress shirt with one mismatched button sewn on with a darker thread (he didn’t wear the Peggy’s Pretzels uniform like the rest of us), or even his faded black tennis shoes with two wide Velcro straps. It was because he was an old person working. Not volunteering at a WWII museum or watering begonias in his front beds or stamping Bingo cards at the Y, but working in a pretzel shop n the mall for $10/hr.

It was my job to train Mr. Barrett. I presented the pre-made balls of dough and showed him how to roll them out a foot-and-a-half, using for measurement the long, Sharpie-ticked piece of masking tape I’d aligned with the edge of the countertop—one of my best booth improvements.

“That’s what we call the ‘noodle,’” I explained, although I was the only one who called it this. “The uncooked, unformed, rolled-out pretzel.”

Mr. Barrett stared at the counter. His eyes were frosty—maybe cataracts, or maybe the glint of the mall’s halogen lights on his glasses. At his temples, tufts of white hair trembled under the small plastic fan I’d installed above the dough station. Around us, the butter smell intensified, mingling with his medicinal odor.

“I remember when I was in your shoes,” I said. This immediately seemed like the wrong thing to say to someone who was probably sixty years older than me. “When I first started,” I clarified, “the guy who trained me said, ‘Just use your forearm to measure.’ And then I said to him, “Great idea, Sam, but when you’re the 6’2″ Captain of the Swim Team versus the 5’4″ Coloring Club Founder and President, there are going to be some noodle discrepancies.'” Above us, the neon Peggy’s Pretzels sign buzzed out of time to the faint rhythms playing through the mall speakers. “Got it, Mr. Barrett?”

It was like he found his voice in the air somewhere. “Barrett is my Christian name, Michelle. No need for a ‘Mr.’” He put his hand on top of mine. It was cool and crinkly, like a sheet of phyllo dough.

I wasn’t comfortable calling older people by their first names. My Child Growth and Development professor sat on top of her desk, spreading her wide pleated skirts and insisting we call her “Lorraine,” but I just avoided the whole issue. There were children, teenagers, younger adults, middle-agers, and the elderly—categories and stages that came with sets of acceptable behaviors. There had to be some division. We couldn’t all be “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Barrett.”

“You could call me ‘Barry’ if that helps,” Mr. Barrett said, and I felt some relief when he took his hand away. ” That’s how I’m known at Hillwater.” His nursing home. He swayed a little in the A/C breeze. Mr. Barrett was a person whose handkerchief you picked off the floor. He needed to be helped across the street or shown how to use the remote again. He didn’t seem like a coworker.

“Barry was a friend of my dad’s,” Boss had explained. “Be patient with him—he’s old.”

I’d thumbsed-up like this was something I could upvote.

Boss was a heavy man with a center so wide it nearly touched both counters. He wore short-sleeve Hawaiian shirts, even in January. “Barry will sub for Sam—different energy, I know.” He laughed like air pushed from an innertube. “Just until swim season ends. With some luck, Sam’ll be back in April—or May if the team makes it to State.”

Summer was a long way off. Maybe Sam would get carried off by an alligator while swimming laps in a lake. “Can I ask a weird question?” I whispered. “Why does Mr. Barrett want to work here?”

Boss grabbed a cinnamon-sugar from the warming case. “Why does anybody want to worl, Michelle?” Near the door of the booth, past the register and the fountainous lemonade machine, Mr. Barrett hunched, staring at the rubber floor mats. He took a yellowed linen handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Can you help Barry back to Dillard’s after your shift? Thanks.” Boss waved the remainder of his pretzel at me, hook-like, while he rounded the booth.

Mr. Barrett’s pretzels crusted black and stuck to the baking sheet. They crossed without twisting. They mounded like ziggurats. They languished, undersalted in his wrinkled mitts. He didn’t sprinkle enough flour, so the counter gummed up, and he worked so slowly the dough got too warm to manipulate. He was only nominally better at the register, bending down so close that when I touched the screen later, my fingerpads smeared oily puddles left by his nose prints. He could never remember how to do the twist. Make the goal, cross the posts, twist, attach, score. That’s how Sam explained it. With him, everything was sports. Any time he had a piece of trash, he’d stand on the opposite side of the long, thin booth and try to make a jump shot into the bin. Even when we made the beverages, he called it “filling the lemonade up to the pool line.”

Sam had no trouble reaching the top of the drink dispensers, which I couldn’t get to without freeclimbing the counter. “Let me take care of it,” he’d say. “If you need anything, just ask.” But then I’d see the salt dish or the rolling pin or the sponge perched up there. When I requested his help, he’d pluck the items down ceremoniously, presenting them to me with an excessive bow. “M’lady.”

Eventually, I bought my own stepstool. It was stolen in the first week, so I bought another one that folded and lugged it to and from the garage.
                        *

In the library of Hillcountry Community College, I pressed a nubbly golden rod around the outlines of Klimt’s The Kiss. Next to me, Willow’s black and violet bouquet of Van Gogh’s Irises had “goth vibes,” she explained. Under her pixie cut, which crested into a wave, one lone chain earring dangled to the tabletop. I’d never seen Willow wear two earrings. When she showed up to her Peggy’s shift a few months ago with the same look, I’d offered to help retrace her steps to find the lost one. She told me I was a “hoot,” so I took a chance and invited her to “In the Lines.” She seemed to think the club was ironic. There weren’t any other members, so I went with it. Committees wanted to see leadership in extracurriculars, so starting a club was garnish for my applications to Master’s in Education programs. I’d read research showing how coloring decreases stress and improves mood, focus, and sleep quality—and that it can reduce blood pressure in both kids and adults. Plus, I didn’t have any other skills except pretzel-making, which seemed too close to a baking circle, and “Buns Upon a Time” had already been operating at HCC since 2005.

“He’s like 80? Where’s his family?” Willow reached for forest green.

“His son lives in a different country,” I said. I’d learned this from the woman who walked Mr. Barrett over from Dillard’s every morning. “He can’t visit much.”

In the library lobby, we were mostly ignored. Keys clicked at the public computers, and every now and then a librarian beeped a scanner gun. The basket of mini–Snickers I’d brought remained untouched in the center of the table.

“What do you think happened to him?” Willow asked.

“He’s old,” I said.

“I’m talking about his life,” Willow said. “Why’s he working at Peggy’s? Did he run out of money? Is he about to get kicked out of the home?” She put her crayon down. “Capitalism is so fucked. We should just take care of people Universal income.” Willow was pre-law.

“He’s got to have Social Security,” I said, although this was a hazy subject. I spent all day studying children, thinking so much about growth that there wasn’t time to consider old age or the problems that came with it.

                       *

At 3:30 pm every day when the evening crew arrived, I walked Mr. Barrett to Dillard’s. It was in the opposite direction of the parking garage, but I had three hours before my night classes. The going was slow. Mr. Barrett’s feet shuffled beneath him, 45 degrees out like hockey sticks. His shoulders hunched to correct his balance. His breath erupted in puffs. As the weeks passed, mall employees began to salute us like some formal procession. The guys at Aeropostale would wave, shouting, “Hey Mr. B!” The middle-aged moms at Bath & Body Works would pause, mid-spritz, to smile at our crossing. Even the overworked nerds at the Apple store would tip their chins, passing whatever device they were holding through the air in little rainbow arcs when we walked by. Outside the women’s formalwear exit at Dillard’s, I’d hover near Mr. Barrett’s elbow, ready to catch him as he lowered himself onto the stone bench. Sometimes I’d stay until the bus came—a short one with a friendly driver and “Hillwater Senior Community” painted on the side. Mr. Barrett always waved goodbye from the bus window, recalling videos of grateful sloths who’ve been plucked from traffic and placed on nearby trees.

The first few weeks after he started working, customers would stare and sometimes ask if he was the owner. Once, a pimply pre-teen sneered, “Is it ‘Bring Your Grandpa to Work Day’?”

But mostly people just looked concerned. They’d whisper at me in the bathroom: “Where are his people?” “Did he lose all his money to a phone scam? My boyfriend’s grandmother lives with his family now since she wired her retirement to Nigeria.”

We speculated about his finances. Rumors circulated he’d run out of money and could no longer afford the rent in his assisted-living facility. That he froze half-eaten pieces of toast in washed-for-reuse aluminum foil. That he’d spent his life savings on medical procedures for his wife, who died anyway.

“That actually happened to my friend’s dad,” Sunglass Hut girl told me.

Mr. Barrett didn’t say much, which was a nice change from Sam, who’d dominated the booth, playing the country station so loud customers had to shout their orders, eating a tenth of our product when it was hottest from the oven. He was always reaching over me with his long arms to pry a cup from the cup tower, dip the brush in the egg wash, or dredge the biggest crystals from the Kosher salt dish—sometimes with his bare hands, which were monstrous paddles attached to squid-tentacled arms. 

Mr. Barrett didn’t take up much space; he stood like a crooked light post over by the lemonade. I began to think of him as a garden gnome or one of those waving cats. Since I’d have to redo all his work anyway, I just parked him at the drink station, streamlining shift procedures as much as possible, including a laminated checklist. Every hour on the quarter-hour, I popped in another half-dozen since the whole marketing concept was to send the smell of pretzel butter wafting at regular intervals through every recess of the mall. (The oven had a special vent fan for this purpose.) Mr. Barrett just filled the drinks. Sometimes when the line got long at lunch hour, I’d wish for a normal shift mate, but Mr. Barrett was far better than Sam, who when I was making or shaping noodles, would travel the length of the booth, brushing against my back or my side. I asked him to stop a couple of times. “Sorry, Sorry!” His palms would stick up in the air. “It’s a small place.” Then he’d pour himself a shot of lemonade or tear an arm off a ‘zel and pop it in his mouth, sucking his fingers on their way out. “In case ypu haven’t noticed, I’m a big guy.” To demonstrate, he’d extend his arms, which crossed more than half the booth.

On Sam’s last day of work before swim season, he stretched his long arms aaround me from behind, pinning me to the dough station. The food court was deserted since it was long after the lunch rush. My hands dissappeared under his. “If you press harder, you’ll get better results,” he whispered in my ear, moving his pelvis against me. He squeezed my finders into the dough, cold and sticky.

I think I laughed. Why did I do that? I don’t remember driving home. In the shower, I scrubbed myself for half an hour. I’d planned to tell Boss, but the next day Sam was gone. I just wanted to forget.

                       *

Mr. Barrett seemed benign. He always asked the same questions.

“Where do you attend college, Michelle?”

“Hillcountry CC,” I’d remind him. “Somebody decided to make our mascot a mole. Blind, digs in the dirt, messes-up-your-petunias kinda mole.”

“What subject are you majoring in?”

Each time I told him it was “Early Childhood Development,” his eyebrows danced, and he’d tell me how he’d wanted to marry his sixth-grade teacher. “I’d put a gift on her desk every day,” he’d explain again. “Flowers I’d picked from the school grounds, peaches, love letters.” He’d chuckle. “What grade would you like to teach?”

“Early education is crucial, so I’ll start in kindergarten,” I’d explain. “Once I’ve got experience in the classroom, I’ll go into admin, then policy. Free pre-K for everyone. Investing in teachers. Letting research dictate practice. One day, maybe you’ll be saying ‘I used to work at Peggy’s Pretzels with the Secretary of Education.'”

We both pretended he’d be alive long enough to witness the fruition of my twenty-year plan. Sometimes he’d take my hand and rub his dry, wrinkled thumb around my knuckles. I didn’t really want him to touch me, but it seemed rude not to let him. I reminded myself that he wasn’t Sam. A couple weeks later, he’d ask the same questions again. I asked Boss once if Mr. Barrett had Alzheimer’s or dementia.

“He’s just old, Michelle. When you’re old, you forget things.”

                       *

In class, I was learning how important community was to brain health, so as Mr. Barrett’s main point of contact for 24 hours a week, I felt increasingly responsible for some portion of his mental health and elderly development. I had no idea how old Mr. Barrett was, but 85 seemed like a good guess, so I brought in my portable speaker to play compilations of Forties and Fifties music. He’d tap his foot pleasantly until he fell asleep, and by the end of our shift, I’d be humming “Powder Your Face with Sunshine” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

I looked up midcentury slang and worked it into my vocabulary.

“Swell day out there, huh, Mr. Barrett? We got it made in the shade.”

“I’m headed to the can before this place goes antsville.”

At home, I googled “questions elderly” and compiled a list.

“What was your first job?”

He had to raise his shoulders, like opening a lid, to look at me. I’d keep rolling out a noodle but incline my chin to let him know I was listening. “My father got me a paper route making $5 a week. I was never very good at aiming my deliveries.” He’d chuckle, teetering on his stool. “I quit as soon as I earned enough to buy a new bike. Then I spent all my time fishing at the creek.”

I’d wipe a floury thumb on my apron and unlock my phone screen to read the next question. “What do you think was the greatest invention in your lifetime?” Sometimes he wouldn’t move or respond, so I couldn’t be sure he’d heard me or if he was even still awake. And sometimes I’d pop a whole batch in the oven or make a few sales before he’d answer.

“The Compact Disc.”

“Huh?”

“CDs. Superior to vinyl. The sound is cleaner, and they don’t wear down like LPs. I replaced all my records with Compact Discs.”

I’d never owned a CD, but I could imagine Mr. Barrett in his worn-carpet room, putting the Everly Brothers into an old boombox while a can of SpaghettiOs burbled on the stovetop.

“CDs are the only good new invention since 1950,” he said.

“Computers?” I asked. “The internet? GPS?”

“Pretzels are the same, though,” he said. “The smell helps me remember.”

A half-batch of originals was baking in the oven. Just for Mr. Barrett, I pulled them out to brush on an extra layer of butter. The scent—baking bread, toasted butter, the promise of salt—didn’t take me back to the past, but I could imagine how it would transport my shift mate. He was probably remembering wide cars with tailfins, Saturday nights at the sock hop, the whole family gathered around the black-and-white TV.

I set a pretzel-topped tray into one of Mr. Barrett’s palms. “Wait until it cools,” I said.

He reached out with his other hand to run his dead-leaf fingertips down the side of my face. I froze.

“No,” I said.

Mr. Barrett’s expression crumbled into a smile. “You remind me so much of a girl I knew in 1958. Betty,” he said. “Boy, she was a looker.” When I didn’t say anything, his gaze fell to the floor mats. “I get lost in my memories,” he said. Mr. Barrett hunched over his pretzel, thin and frail. His glasses drooped all the way to the end of his nose. The crowded sounds of the food court seemed to exclude him. When he tore a small piece from his pretzel for me, I ate it, even though I wasn’t sure when he’d last washed his hands.

                       *

I’d invited Mr. Barrett to coloring club, thinking he’d never show up. But there he was one Friday in March, shuffling slowly across the library lobby’s faded carpet. Having Mr. Barrett at our table, especially next to Willow, whose hair was blue then, was like running into Big Bird at a keg party. Normally, we were invisible to the pre-meds drowning in Chem at corner tables, jocks trying to un-jam printers, pre-engineering majors snoozing on the worn cloth couches, and the one person an hour who’d check out an actual book. But with Mr. Barrett, suddenly we were conspicuous. It started with the shift change at the reference desk. Two Anthro majors introduced themselves.

“Las Meninas,” Anthro major #1 said about my coloring page selection. “Is it PC to color that?” He smirked as they joined our table.

“Does your grandad need a sweater?” Anthro major #2 asked. “There’s a ton in lost and found.”

Before I could explain we weren’t related, Mr. Barrett spoke in his quiet voice: “Sometimes I just shiver.”

Anthro major #2 disappeared behind the reference desk, then returned with a large HCC-embroidered blanket. “This beats a hoodie,” she said as she draped it over his shoulders.

“Important question,” Willow said to Mr. Barrett. “It’s 45 outside, tops— what happened to your coat?”
Mr. Barrett’s shirt had been thinned by a thousand washes. With the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he looked like someone rescued from a shipwreck. He pushed a light peach onto the woman’s face in American Gothic. He could have been anyone’s grandfather.

“I don’t spend a lot of time outside,” he explained. “Just from the bus to the building.”

That weekend, I scrolled through HCC’s options for summer courses in senior care—maybe I could minor in “elderly development” or “end-of-life guidance.” But searching the catalogue revealed only one course: Long Term Care Administration. Part of the nursing track. Why wasn’t there a geriatric specialty? There were dozens of courses on child development. Weren’t the old also worthy of study? Of care?

On Monday, Willow showed up for her shift early with a newspaper-wrapped gift. She put it on the counter in front of Mr. Barrett. “Open it,” she said. He peeled away the pages. A tweed jacket—the kind with distinguished elbow patches. Willow helped Mr. Barrett put it on. The fit was good. “It’s winter, so you should be wearing a coat.” She poured herself a lemonade and pretended like it was no big deal.

Mr. Barrett ran his hands over each sleeve. “My father had one just like this,” he said.

I taped his American Gothic coloring page to the booth wall, noticing for the first time that the man with the pitchfork also wore little round glasses.

                        *

Willow wasn’t the only one giving Mr. Barrett presents. By mid-March, he was a minor mall celebrity. The girls at Great American Cookie would bring fresh samples to our booth—frosted snickerdoodles, fudge brownies, triangles of cookie cake. “You’re too thin,” they’d say. “Here’s a warm oatmeal raisin.” His admirers liked giving him things because he seemed like someone who needed them. The Bath & Body Works ladies brought him lotions and soaps. The Cheesecake Factory line cooks sent him home with meals in to-go containers. The Crocs employees brought him a pair of ridiculous yellow shoes, which he then wore every Monday—definitely not in line with Peggy’s dress code, but who was going to police Mr. Barrett’s footwear? He received candles from Earthbound Trading Company, cologne samples from Dillard’s, a Fossil wallet someone had returned with a small defect, and Häagen-Dazs samples twice as large as usual. One day, the whole team from Warby Parker showed up at our booth with brand-new glasses. “We called Hillwater Community,” a woman in a labcoat said, “for your prescription.” They adjusted the glasses right there. The frames were still round but bigger so that he didn’t have to raise his shoulders as much to look straight ahead.

An art major at Hot Topic made a stencil of Mr. Barrett’s outline, and tags of his silhouette—hunched back, hair wisps, tweed coat, big round glassess—appeared all over the parking garage and on bus benches near the mall. I even saw on a campus trash can. Beneath the outline of Mr. Barrett, in all caps, the word REGARD.

At coloring club, I asked Willow, “Why not just ‘Mr. B’?” She was adding a purple headband to Andy Warhol’s Blue Marilyn. “It’s what he means to everyone,” she said. “‘Regard’ is respect, but it’s also like, ‘look at this,’ ‘pay attention to this.’” Willow chose black for Monroe’s lipstick. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” she said. Since Mr. Barrett came to coloring club, he’d become a favorite topic of conversation, so when Willow put her crayon down, all five new club members leaned in. “Mr. B is a tragic symbol,” she said. “How many of us are saving enough for retirement on what we make? At Peggy’s?” She pointed to me. “At work study?” She pointed to Anthro majors #1 and #2. “We’re young, so it feels like we can put it off. But who’s to say we’ll be able to do it later? Who teaches us even to think about the future that way? Clearly, Social Security isn’t enough, if it will even last.” I imagined her striding up to a box of transfixed, nodding jurors. “The system is broken,” she said. “Will we ever be able to stop working?”

                        *

Willow was right about our concern—that it was planted in something more than grandparental appeal or an urge to help. By April, the word raise was echoing across the mall’s broad tiles, spilling down the escalators, pooling in the shallow green fountains. The woman from Dillard’s who walked Mr. Barrett over in the mornings was the first.

“I told my husband, ‘Harry, we need to start saving more than five percent,’ and he said, ‘You’d better ask Wanda for a raise,’ but I was like, ‘That stone-cold B?’ Pardon my language, Barry. But I did, and she brought me up to $10.75.”

This was just the beginning. Thd Starbucks baristas unionized. Victoria’s Secret set an A-frame sign out front advertising $11/hr, and several beauty consultants from Sephora defected. A couple who worked at Patagonia came over for ‘zels to celebrate an increase in their 401(k) match. All across the mall, employees quit. and the people who replaced them were paid more.

Peggy’s wasn’t immune to raise-fever. Willow and her shift mate, Todd, arrived early one day to show me a petition for increasing our hourly to $12. Stealing furtive glances around the food court, she confessed, “We’re shooting for $11 but want to start the bargaining higher.” Her long earring swung in circles. “I asked Mr. B to sign,” she whispered. “He didn’t seem to want to, so I didn’t force it. I couldn’t be responsible for him losing his job.” Perched on his stool like some forgotten owl, Mr. Barrett filled a lemonade for a customer, then spilled some on the counter. “If we get the raise, he’ll get it, too,” Willow said. “Maybe he can get some new shirts or take a day off some time.”

It worked. In late April, Boss said that in two weeks we’d all be making $11/hr. I tried to focus on this, but my brain was performing the most elaborate twists to avoid thinking about when Sam would return. HCC kept reminding me in campus-wide emails: “My, Those Moles Can Swim! Team Advances to State.” “HCC Floats to the Top: Interview with Swim Team Captain Samuel Sharper.”

Boss sent the official raise notice in an email, but Mr. Barrett didn’t have a computer, let alone an email address, so a magenta-haired Willow showed up early the next day to tell him. Mr. Barrett took her hand, rubbing it with his usual thumb circles. But then he did something he’d never done before. Still clutching Willow’s hand, he pulled it up to his lips and kissed her right beneath her knuckles. A strange expression struck Willow’s face.

An older woman buying a pretzel dog said, “That’s so sweet.”

I walked Mr. Barrett to Dillard’s through the usual chorus of farewells, but on my way back to the garage, Willow flagged me down. She pulled me to a fake ficus in the seating area.

“He licked me.”

“What?” I asked.

“Mr. B. I felt his tongue on my skin.”

At first, this seemed preposterous. “Maybe his mouth was just extra wet?” I pictured the way Mr. Barrett’s lips nearly disappeared as they wrapped inward around his teeth.

Willow kept wiping the back of her hand on her khakis. “Todd said I probably imagined it, but I didn’t. He fucking licked me.”

I thought about when Mr. Barrett had stroked my face. “Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

As Willow picked at the fake moss in the greenery display, the corners of her mouth jerked downward. “Why do they always have to ruin it?” She plucked off a plastic leaf. “I got everyone a raise, then an old man fucking licked me.”

We stayed under the ficus, talking even as the food court filled up for the dinner rush. I had Early Child Development at 6, but I skipped it. Todd protested weakly from the booth. Eventually, I explained what had happened with Sam. It felt good to finally tell someone.

The next day, we sat at the same table in the food court with Boss, who listened while we talked, clicking his tongue and shifting in his seat. The palm trees on his shirt rippled. “First, I want to tell you how sorry I am,” he said when we were finished. “What you’ve described is unacceptable.” He turned to Willow. “But everybody loves Barry. Are you positive he licked you? Maybe it was an accident. He’s got to be like 80, and I don’t think he really knows what’s going on all the time.” He tapped his forehead, then he turned to me. “Sam has to pay for school. I’m not defending what he did, but does the guy deserve to lose his job for brushing up against you too many times?” He laid his fists gently on the table between us. “I’ll have a serious talk with him. This kind of thing cannot happen, and it won’t. He’ll stay in his own space after I’m through with him, I guarantee it,” John Mayer piped through the mall speakers, and the smell of waffle cones floated over from Marble Slab.

“I don’t think I can work with Sam anymore,” I explained. Boss started to say something, but I anticipated his objection. “I can’t switch shifts—I’ve already registered for summer classes.”

Boss rattled the ice at the bottom of his cup. “Sam can’t work the late shift because of practice. I swear he’s a good kid. He got cocky. Made a mistake. It’s not going to happen again.”

“I streamlined shift processes,” I said. “I taped noodle measurements to the dough station. Every day, I walk Mr. Barrett to Dillard’s. It takes almost twenty minutes because he’s so slow.” My voice got loud, and near us, a man eating a waffle fry paused, fry dangling mid-air. “That’s at least an hour a week of unpaid work—that I’ve been doing since January.”

“I didn’t ask you to walk Barry to Dillard’s every day,” Boss said.

“Yes, you did.” I remembered this distinctly.

“I asked you once. After that, it was on you.” He leaned back, squeaking the plastic booth. “Whatever happened to human decency? Sometimes you just do something because it’s nice. Should you get paid for putting your cart away at the grocery store? For opening the door for someone? Do you want a quarter every time you say ‘thank you’?” Boss’s palms found his belly. “I don’t know what else you expect me to do. I can’t just fire everybody who touches you.” The man near us finally put the waffle fry in his mouth.

Willow took off her apron and laid it on the table. She looked at me, and I realized it was my last day at Peggy’s Pretzels. The raise hadn’t even taken effect yet.

                       *

I wasn’t unemployed for long; Brighton’s Collectibles was hiring, although at a 50¢/hr pay cut. My new manager hated my ex-boss, so she didn’t even need a reference. “That shithead parks in the handicap spot when he’s running late,” she explained at my interview. “As if leaving your flashers on makes that okay.”

I expected more from the mallspeople. Willow and I told some of them what happened, knowing it would eventually get around. When Sam started working at Peggy’s again, they’d come to Brighton’s with stories of how they’d
snubbed him.

“I didn’t acknowledge him at all,” a girl from Aeropostale told me in June. “I just got my cinnamon sugar and left.”

“But you still bought a pretzel,” I said. Meanwhile, Mr. Barrett stayed on, presumably to replace me, and he was so beloved that most remained convinced it was a misunderstanding.

“I’ve seen him drool when he nods off by the lemonade,” a Great American Cookie girl said to me on break once. “It was probably just spit.”

“Barry needs this job,” said one woman from Tory Burch. “Did you see the hole in his pants yesterday? We’re getting him a patch from Jo-Ann’s.” She fumbled in her purse for lipstick. “Willow’s young—she’ll be fine.”

In the garage, I saw a new tag of Mr. B—bug round glasses and wispy hair—but in this stencil, he was sticking out his tongue in the pose of that famous Albert Einstein photo. I didn’t mention the tag to Willow, who refused to get another job at the mall. She snagged a spot at the library circulation desk with the Anthro majors. “It pays less, but I can just study the whole time,” she said. For a while, she talked about taking our story to the ACLU or filing a complaint with the Workforce Commission. Then she got busy studying for the LSAT.

By August, the regard for Mr. Barrett had seemed to rub off on Sam. Walking by Peggy’s on my way to the garage, I’d see mallspeople crowded around the booth, laughing, eating samples. One weekend night, I stopped by when neither of them were working. Next to the register, they’d put up two pictures: Sam and his teammates in Speedos—all smiling and wearing medals—and another of him and Mr. Barrett, arm-in-arm by the pretzel case.

It all baked inside me. I still had two semesters of coursework left, but that fall I dropped down to six hours with nothing major-related—just Figure Drawing and College Algebra. At some point, I’d need to adjust my twenty-year plan to account for this slow semester, but that could wait. Thinking about care exhausted me now. Who deserved it? Who should provide it? What should they receive in return?

                        *

In September, Mr. Barrett died in his sleep. When he wasn’t on the bus one day, the woman who walked with him from Dillard’s heard it from the driver. Someone told the goths at Hot Topic, who texted the teens at Spencer’s Gifts, who ran next door to Abercrombie & Fitch, who called out across the balcony to American Eagle, who took the news to Foot Locker, The Children’s Place, and Lush Cosmetics. The whole mall went into mourning. Someone draped a long black flag off the balcony outside Urban Outfitters. It billowed there, solemnly. The next day, a kid from Doc Marten’s brought in a hundred stickers of the REGARD stencil; most stores stuck it on their front windows. Dillard’s erected a little shrine at their first-floor mall entrance. The girls at Great American Cookie started a GoFundMe to put a commemorative plaque near the food court fountain. Before a week had passed, they’d surpassed their goal, so they used the extra funding to buy a larger one with Mr. Barrett’s face engraved in the middle. Beneath this: Barrett S. Waddington: Co-worker and Friend.

The rest of us hadn’t known his last name until the plaque unveiling, which took place one Sunday an hour before the mall opened. At first, I didn’t want to go, but eventually succumbed to curiosity and hovered near the back. Everyone was there, dressed up as if for church. The woman who walked Mr. Barrett from Dillard’s stood in front with my ex-boss. The teens from Sharper Image wore slacks that pooled around their heels. The Crocs and Warby Parker tribes were harder to spot, but I found them, off to the side in gingham button-ups. Some of the Bath & Body Works moms had brought their kids, who fidgeted until they were handed phones. Sam stood near the front. A man in a gray suit took the microphone from the Great American Cookie girls and introduced himself as Mr. Barrett’s son. Mallspeople shifted in uncomfortable dress shoes. This was the person who should’ve been taking care of Mr. Barrett.

“Thank you for honoring my dad. You all meant so much to him,” Mr. Barrett’s son said. “Coming to Peggy’s was the highlight of his week. I’m in London, so I couldn’t visit often. But when I did, I’d eat dinner with Dad at Hillwater—their food is pretty good.” He laughed, and a few chuckles answered from the crowd. “He would talk and talk about all of you. Those big glasses you gave him.” The folks from Warby Parker softened, misty-eyed. “And he loved wearing those bright yellow Crocs.” A louder laugh, like a release, waved through the congregation. “He just loved working. Only a few weeks ago, I came to see him in action, hanging out in the booth with Sam.” Mr. Barrett’s son’s voice cracked, and I could feel everyone forgive him: he was an ocean away. He visited when he could. “dad always said what an honor it was to work here.” Sam crossed one monstrous palm across his heart.

Mr. Barrett’s son smoothed his expensive, well-tailored suit. “A lot of thanks are in order,” he said. “First, to Peggy’s Pretzels.” He held out a hand to my ex-boss, who dipped a little bow in return. “Our fathers served in the Korean War together.” The crowd hummed in new appreciation for Mr. Barrett. “Second, thank you to the administrators at Hillwater.” Mr. Barrett’s son scanned the audience. “I don’t think they could make it. The Senior Service program has been a big success. My father loved to work. He loved getting up in the morning with an objective. When he retired after forty years in senior management at Chevron, they said to him, ‘Take a break, Barry—go buy a house or three in the Bahamas.’ But that was never his style. Dad wouldn’t even buy himself a new shirt.” He chuckled. “His job at Peggy’s didn’t give him a paycheck, but it gave him a purpose.”

The A/C stopped blowing. Someone had turned off the Muzak, so everything was still. In that moment, I like to think we all felt the same range of emotions, like the silt disturbed by an anchor dragged a little way along the ocean floor: a collective unconscious, ruffled. We had made assumptions. He had never really taken shape. We had given him so much. He had never needed it. Someone’s phone clattered to the linoleum. “Lastly,” Mr. Barrett’s son continued, “thank you, Sam, for befriending an old man and making the last months of his life so meaningful. Dad wanted you to have this.” He pulled an envelope out of his breast pocket and waved it above the podium. “This will cover tuition and expenses for your last four semesters.”

A perplexed and giddy Sam strode up to the podium. Everyone else looked at me, where something inside was blackening.

“I’m so grateful,” Mr. Barrett’s son continued, winding down to a final sentence we’d all remember in the coming weeks—as the shrines came down, as the stickers peeled from window panes left behind gooey circles, when the janitors threw away the long black mourning flag, and when we discovered, one November morning, illegible dripping red letters graffitied across Mr. Barrett’s plaque. He said, “Thank you for taking care of my father.”

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Elle Richardson lives in Houston, where she grows vegetables in her front yard just to spite the HOA. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Pinch, Southern Indiana Review, and Peatsmoke. Her first novel, Pornostiltskin, was a finalist in the 2024 Writers League of Texas Manuscript Competition and is forthcoming with Zando in 2028.