Back in the day I used to work at Target. I started there my senior year of high school as a cashier and eventually worked my way around the store doing different things. I worked on the sales floor, the fitting room as their phone operator, price change team, stocked toys over the holidays and managed the funky signage that hangs all throughout the store.
The last couple years of my career at Target were rough. It was during a time when I was dropping into and out of college and I somehow found myself being bounced back and forth between working third shift and first shift. I expressed my dissatisfaction with the schedule to my supervisor, a great lady named Bev, but her hands were tied because she was not the one who dictated when we were to work nights. That job belonged to one of the store managers, a diminutive Philippino lady named Charito.
Charito also knew I was unhappy, but my unhappiness was not her concern until the day she approached me to let me know I’d be working another week of nights. It was at that moment I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand the thought of working another graveyard shift only to be put back on days again and I gave Charito my two weeks notice on the spot. I had thought of quitting many times, but I always imagined it would happen after I found employment elsewhere.
I went home that day feeling liberated and scared out of my mind. I was 22 years old and facing unemployment. I was a college dropout with no savings, no prospects and a father who expected to be paid rent every week. Quitting a job without having another one waiting was something my brother would do (and has done repeatedly).
Later the next week, close to the end of my final two weeks at Target, I got into my car after work and found I couldn’t insert the key into the ignition. No matter how hard I tried, the key would not go in and I wound up calling a tow truck. As I watched my car being hoisted out of the spot I’d driven into that morning, I thought this might be a sign I wasn’t meant to leave. At least not yet.
So I stayed. When I came back to work the next day I approached Charito and rescinded my resignation. She was happy. Me? Not so much. I felt defeated and embarrassed and was not looking forward to several more months, if not years, of bouncing back and forth between days and nights.
Eventually I went back to school (temporarily) and was able to get a steady schedule during waking hours. One evening, about a year after the incident with my car, I ran into a guy I used to work with. He and his wife both used to work at Target and had moved on to other jobs months before. They had since separated and he was splitting his time between working at a furniture store in Ypsilanti and working for his mother at her grain elevator on the weekends. Even though I hadn’t cared much for the guy when he was my coworker, I felt bad about his impending divorce and threw him a bone by giving him my phone number.
Sometimes I know when I’m being tested and sometimes it takes years for me to figure out why things happened the way they did. Right now I’m being tested and I would love nothing more than to be able to look into the future as easily as I’m able to look into the past and know things are the way they are for a reason.
Maybe there is no such thing as fate and maybe I’m romanticizing the past a little too much because I know what happened after I gave the guy my phone number.
He called me.
But if my car hadn’t broken down in the Target parking lot I may have actually quit the job and wouldn’t have been there when Nathan came back looking for me.
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Autumn At Oak Hollow 