Bentley Little - The Store

"Well, I guess that's good," Bill said doubtfully.

"I'd rather have things back the way they were."

"Who wouldn't?"

On the way home, Bill passed by the new park, saw a clearly delineated baseball diamond with an oversized chain-link backstop and two three-tiered metal bleachers. A crew of workers was putting up a fence around a tennis court adjacent to the baseball field. Across an open expanse of grass was a fully installed playground complete with swings, slides, monkey bars, and teeter totters. Next to that, more workers were pouring concrete for a public swimming pool. The park was nice. New and clean and well planned. Like everything connected with The Store. But at the same time, there was something artificial about it, like a too-expensive present given by an acquaintance trying to buy instant friendship.

As nice as the new park was, he preferred the old park, with its low, sagging backstop made from rusted leftover pipe and torn chicken wire, its overgrown weed field, its tire swing, its primitive sandbox.

Did The Store have to change everything in Juniper?

The first thing he did when he arrived home was check his computer.

He'd received his new assignment: writing instructions for a new accounting package.

An accounting package being developed specifically for The Store.

Bill stared at the color monitor, not scrolling forward, not printing out the message, simply rereading the initial introductory paragraph the company had E-mailed to him. He felt weird, uncomfortable, uneasy. Automated Interface was one of the biggest software firms in the country, and over the past several years he'd written documentation for programs that had been developed by their company for a host of major corporations: Fox Broadcasting, RJR Nabisco, General Motors, General Foods. But even though The Store was a national corporation, he had a local, personal connection to it, and it felt strange to know that he was helping to develop a product for its use.

He felt as though he was working for The Store.

In a sense, he was working for The Store, and he didn't like that. He knew now how all those old antiwar protesters felt when they ended up getting jobs at Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas and other aerospace defense firms. There was a moral dilemma here. He had rationalized shopping at The Store, had told himself that he wasn't betraying his principles by patronizing the establishment or by letting his daughter apply for a job there, and he felt comfortable with that.

But this seemed different somehow, and he reread the message yet again before scrolling forward to check out the details of the project.

He knew he couldn't decline this assignment. He didn't have that luxury.

If he refused to perform the job assigned to him, Automated Interface would simply let him go and hire another tech writer. So, in a sense, it was out of his hands, it was not his decision to make.

He felt guilty, though, felt as though he should do something to avoid contributing to the strength of The Store, and he was still sitting in front of the screen of his PC, rereading the assignment, when Ginny arrived home from work.

They went out for dinner that night. Chicken. He still called the place "Colonel Sanders,' " but the colonel was long dead, and he'd sold the franchise to some corporation years before that. These days, the bright red-and-white sign in front of the restaurant read KFC.

He wondered how many young kids knew that KFC stood for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Not too many.

Their entire lives were run by corporations these days. Companies test marketed names and logos and spokespeople, held conferences and meetings to determine how to best capture their target audience, based decisions on demographics. Chain outlets were given ethnic names or folksy appearances, attempts were made to disguise the individual tentacles of huge conglomerates by making them seem part of some other, smaller company. Actual small, locally owned businesses were becoming a thing of the past.

Shannon saw a group of her friends at one of the other tables and asked if she could stay and hang out with them, and Ginny said it was okay as long as she was home by ten. Sam was meeting two of her friends at the movie theater, so he and Ginny dropped her off on their way back.

"Looks like we have at least a couple of hours to ourselves," Ginny said, snuggling next to him in the car as they drove home.

"Looks that way," Bill agreed.

"You in the mood to make use of it?"

He grinned. "I'm always in the mood."

He wasn't exactly in the mood, though, and it took longer than they'd planned. They barely had time to get dressed and make the bed before Shannon arrived. Sam returned twenty minutes later, and both girls went immediately to their respective rooms, closing and locking the doors behind them.

Later, after they'd both showered, after they'd watched the late newscast from Phoenix, they lay in bed. Bill thought about Shannon's request tonight for her own charge card, and he cleared his throat. "Do you ever worry that the girls are too . . ." His voice trailed off.

"Materialistic?"

"Yeah."

She rolled over to face him. "Sometimes," she admitted.

"It's our job, you know, as parents, to instill values in them." He paused. "Sometimes I wonder if we've done our job or if we've completely failed."

"Society's self-correcting. Kids always rebel against their parents and that's why the pendulum always swings back."

"But I didn't think they'd be so . . . materialistic."

"You thought they'd be more like us."

"Well, yeah."

She sighed. "So did I."

They grew silent again. He thought about Shannon, about Sam, but it wasn't really the girls that were bothering him. It was his new assignment, it was Doane's business, it was The Store, it was . . . everything.

He fell asleep trying to think of ways to avoid writing instructions for The Store's new accounting system.

3

Samantha looked at the descending numbers above the elevator door. She was reminded of an old Dr. Seuss movie she'd seen when she was little, _The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T_. In the film, there'd been a series of dungeon basements, and an elevator operator dressed like an executioner had sung out the gruesome specialties of each subterranean floor as the elevator went down.

Mr. Lamb wasn't dressed like an executioner, but the feeling here was pretty close to the one in the film.

The personnel manager had called her yesterday to tell her that she'd gotten the job. Her hands on the receiver had grown sweaty as she heard his voice, and she thought of the lie detector test, the urine sample. She wanted to tell him to go to hell, that she refused to work for The Store. But in a small scared voice she heard herself agree to go down to The Store the next morning an hour before it opened.

"There are a few formalities we have to get out of the way before you start," Mr. Lamb said. "Once they're out of the way, we'll begin training."

"I'll be there," Samantha said.

The employees' section of the parking lot had been full when she'd arrived this morning, but she had yet to see anyone other than Mr. Lamb. The interior of the building was dark, only dim security lights vaguely illuminating the cavernous room. Lights were on in Mr. Lamb's office, though, and it was here she was taken to sign tax forms and additional information forms and a secrecy oath.

"Secrecy oath?" she said, reading the paper in front of her.

"It's just a legality. An assurance to us that you will not use what you learn at The Store to assist one of our rivals in the retail business."

The entire idea rubbed her the wrong way, and the phrase "secrecy oath" put her in mind of clandestine organizations and secret societies, but she read through the document and could find nothing specifically offensive in it, and she signed and dated the paper at the bottom.