We had a brick colonial in Westerville, Ohio, with eighteen thousand dollars left on the mortgage and a kitchen drawer full of birthday candles.
And we had the same employer.
Whitaker Freight Solutions, in Columbus.
Two hundred and twenty employees, forty-one trucks, and a founder who still ate lunch in the break room.
I had worked in Customer Operations for ten years.
Carl ran Regional Operations, two floors above me.
Three promotions in six years.
He liked to say he had earned every one of them.
Our boss, David Whitaker, was sixty-seven, a widower, with silver hair, a bad knee, and a laugh you could hear from the parking lot.
He came to our barbecues.
He sat at the corner of our kitchen table with a plate of my brisket, holding his coffee mug by a crooked little finger, and told Ben terrible fishing stories.
Every March third, a birthday card appeared on my desk, signed in his square handwriting, and I never once wondered how he knew the date.
