What Becca Said
James leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“Because your daughter said something to me last week.”
I just stared at him.
My heart was pounding. My palms were sweating against the armrests of the chair across from his desk. I’d walked into his office five minutes ago certain I was about to be fired. Or written up. Or told that my five-year-old had broken something expensive.
Instead, he’d closed the door and told me the company was giving me a raise.
Not a tiny adjustment. Not a two-percent cost-of-living bump.
A real raise. The kind that changes how you buy groceries.
“What did she say?” I asked.
James didn’t answer right away.
He reached over to the corner of his desk. There was a piece of paper lying face down next to his keyboard. Construction paper. Yellow. The edges a little crumpled.
He turned it over.
He slid it across the desk to me.
“She said a lot of things,” he said quietly. “But mostly, she drew this.”
I looked down at the drawing.
And I stopped breathing.
But I have to go back.
To the morning I almost didn’t bring her.
My name is Kristen Albee. I’m thirty-three years old.
I work at Heartland Medical Supply in Omaha, Nebraska. We distribute hospital supplies. Gloves. Syringes. IV tubing. Gauze. Surgical masks. Everything a hospital uses that it throws away. We have a warehouse the size of four football fields off Interstate 80 and an office building next to it where about a hundred and twenty people work.
I’m an inventory analyst. Or I was.
My job is to make sure we never run out of anything. I look at what hospitals ordered last month and last year and five years ago, and I predict what they’ll order next month. Then I tell purchasing how much to buy.
It sounds boring.
It is boring.
But if I get it wrong, a hospital in Lincoln runs out of size-medium nitrile gloves in the middle of flu season. Or a surgery center in Grand Island doesn’t have the right catheter kit for a man having a heart attack.
So I don’t get it wrong.
I have a daughter.
Her name is Rebecca. Everybody calls her Becca. She’s five.
She has brown curly hair that refuses to be brushed. A gap where her front tooth fell out last month. Freckles across her nose. And absolutely no filter.
None.
Whatever goes into Becca’s head comes out of Becca’s mouth. Immediately. At full volume.
In the grocery store last fall, she pointed at a man in the checkout line and said, “Mommy, that man has a belly like Santa but he’s not wearing red.”
At church on Easter, she asked the pastor why Jesus needed a nap for three days.
At her pediatrician’s office, she told the nurse, “My mommy says bad words at the computer when I’m asleep. But I’m not asleep. I’m on the stairs.”
The nurse looked at me.
I looked at the floor.
It’s just me and Becca.
Her father left when she was eleven months old. His name is Tyler. He decided he wasn’t ready to be a dad. He moved to Denver with a woman he met at a CrossFit gym. He sends a birthday card every year. Sometimes with twenty dollars in it. Sometimes not.
He’s never once called to ask how she’s doing.
I don’t talk about him much. Becca doesn’t either. She knows she has a dad. She knows he lives far away. She drew him once. A stick figure on a mountain. Very small. Far away from the house where she drew us.
That was the whole picture.
When my office announced Bring Your Kid to Work Day, Becca saw the flyer.
It was on the refrigerator. I’d brought it home in my bag by accident and stuck it there with a magnet shaped like a taco.
HEARTLAND MEDICAL SUPPLY — BRING YOUR KID TO WORK DAY — THURSDAY, APRIL 24 — AGES 4–14 WELCOME!
Becca can’t read yet. Not really. But she knows the letters in her name. And she knows the word KID.
She stood in front of the refrigerator for five minutes. Staring at it.
“Mommy,” she said. “What does this say?”
I told her.
Her eyes went huge.
“I get to go to your work?”
“Well—”
“I get to see where you go? Every day? When I’m at Miss Darla’s?”
Miss Darla runs the daycare. Little Sprouts Learning Center. On 72nd Street. Becca goes there from seven-fifteen in the morning until five-forty-five at night.
“I don’t know, baby,” I said. “It’s a long day. It’s pretty boring. It’s just computers.”
“I love computers.”
“You’ve never used a computer.”
“I would love them,” Becca said. “Please, Mommy. Please, please, please. I’ll be so good. I’ll be quiet like a mouse. I’ll be quiet like a mouse who’s asleep.”
I almost said no.
Because Becca has absolutely no filter.
And because there were things at work I didn’t want anybody to know.
Things like the fact that I’d been doing my boss’s job for eighteen months.
Without the title. Without the pay. Without anybody knowing.
I’ll explain.
My boss is James Whitlock.
He’s the Director of Operations at Heartland. Fifty-four. Tall. Gray at the temples. Reading glasses he keeps losing. He wears the same navy blue cardigan every day. He has a little bowl of candy on his desk. Peppermints and butterscotch. He’s been at Heartland for twenty-two years.
He’s a good man. I want to be clear about that.
He’s fair. He’s patient. He never yells. When I had to leave early because Becca had a 103-degree fever last winter, he said, “Go. Don’t even ask. Family first.”
He means it.
But James isn’t a numbers person.
He’s a people person. He’s good at talking to hospital administrators. Good at negotiating with suppliers. Good at calming down a warehouse manager whose forklift just took out a whole row of shelving.
He is not good with spreadsheets.
Every Monday morning, James sends a report to the Vice President of Operations. A man named Gary Hensley. In the corporate office in Kansas City.
It’s called the Weekly Demand Forecast.
It’s a giant spreadsheet. Forty tabs. Thousands of rows. It predicts what every hospital in our region will order over the next ninety days. Gary uses it to decide how much money Heartland spends on inventory. Millions of dollars a week.
James built the spreadsheet in 2014.
It was broken by 2022.
The formulas didn’t account for seasonal flu surges. They didn’t adjust for new hospitals coming online. They didn’t factor in the supply chain delays from overseas factories. Half the links between tabs had broken when somebody in IT updated Excel.
James didn’t know.
He’d plug in the numbers every Sunday night. The spreadsheet would spit out a forecast. He’d send it to Gary on Monday morning.
The forecasts were wrong.
Not a little wrong. Very wrong.
I noticed in the fall of 2022.
I was looking at my own numbers. For the glove inventory. And they didn’t match what James’s forecast said we’d need.
I dug into his spreadsheet.
It was a mess. Broken formulas. Circular references. A tab that was still calculating demand for a hospital in Fremont that had closed in 2019.
If Gary used those forecasts to buy inventory, we were going to run out of things. Important things. In the middle of winter.
I didn’t know what to do.
I could have told James. Your spreadsheet’s broken. But I’d been at Heartland for two years. I was an analyst. He was the director. I was terrified.
What if he got defensive? What if he thought I was trying to make him look bad? What if he decided I was trouble?
I was a single mom with a five-year-old and a daycare bill that was eleven hundred dollars a month.
I couldn’t afford to be trouble.
So I fixed it.
Quietly.
James saved the spreadsheet on the shared drive every Sunday night around eight o’clock. Then he’d send it to Gary first thing Monday morning.
So on Sunday nights, after Becca went to bed at seven-thirty, I’d make myself a cup of coffee. I’d sit at my kitchen table. I’d log in to the shared drive from my laptop.
I’d open his spreadsheet.
And I’d fix it.
I rebuilt the formulas. All of them. Tab by tab. I added seasonal adjustments. I built in supply chain delays. I deleted the hospital in Fremont. I linked everything back together.
It took me six Sunday nights to rebuild it the first time.
After that, it took about three hours a week. Checking his numbers. Fixing whatever broke. Adjusting for new data.
Every Sunday night. From about nine o’clock until midnight.
For eighteen months.
James never noticed.
He’d open the spreadsheet on Monday morning. The numbers would be right. He’d send it to Gary.
Gary started praising the forecasts.
In the spring of 2023, Gary sent an email to the whole operations team. Shout-out to James Whitlock. The Weekly Demand Forecast has been incredibly accurate this year. We haven’t had a single stockout since October. Great work, James.
James forwarded it to me. With a note.
Thanks for all your help with the glove numbers, Kristen! Team effort!
I read that email at my desk and didn’t know what to feel.
I wasn’t angry. Not exactly.
James didn’t know. He genuinely didn’t know. He thought his spreadsheet was working. He thought he’d done it.
And I’d let him.
I’d chosen to fix it in secret. Every Sunday. At midnight. At my kitchen table.
Nobody asked me to.
Nobody knew.
So when Becca stood in front of the refrigerator begging to come to work, I almost said no.
Because Becca knew.
Not the details. She’s five. She doesn’t know what a demand forecast is.
But she knew Mommy sat at the kitchen table on Sunday nights.
She knew Mommy said bad words at the computer.
She knew Mommy was tired every Monday.
And Becca has absolutely no filter.
Still, I gave in.
She looked up at me with those big brown eyes. With the gap in her front teeth. With her curly hair sticking out everywhere.
“Please, Mommy,” she said. “I want to see where you go. When you leave me.”
That got me.
When you leave me.
Every morning at seven-fifteen, I drop her off at Little Sprouts. She hugs me at the door. She waves through the window. She doesn’t cry anymore. She used to. For the first year.
But she still says it. Every morning.
“Where do you go, Mommy?”
“To work, baby.”
“What’s work?”
“It’s where I help hospitals.”
“Can I see it?”
“Someday.”
“Okay,” I said. “You can come.”
Becca screamed so loud our downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling.
That morning, I dressed her in her best outfit.
A purple dress with white polka dots. White tights. Her light-up sneakers. She insisted on the light-up sneakers. I tried to brush her hair. I gave up after four minutes. I put a purple headband in it.
She packed her own backpack.
Crayons. Her coloring book. A notebook with a unicorn on the cover. A granola bar. A juice box. And her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Buttons, who goes everywhere.
“Mr. Buttons wants to see your work too,” she said.
“Mr. Buttons has to stay in the backpack.”
“He’ll be very quiet,” Becca said. “Quieter than me.”
That wasn’t saying much.
We drove to Heartland at seven-forty-five.
Becca pressed her face against the car window the whole way. When we turned into the parking lot and she saw the warehouse, she gasped.
“Mommy,” she whispered. “Is that all your work?”
“That’s the warehouse,” I said. “Where all the supplies are. I work in the office building. The little one.”
“It’s not little,” Becca said. “It’s huge.”
It’s two stories. Brick. With a parking lot.
To Becca, it was a castle.
I showed her my desk.
Second floor. In the middle of a big open office. Cubicles. Gray fabric walls. Fluorescent lights.
My cubicle has two monitors. A phone. A printer on the shelf behind me. A framed photo of Becca on the beach at Lake Manawa last summer, holding a bucket. A sticky note on my monitor that says DAYCARE PICKUP 5:45 in red marker.
Becca stood in the entrance of my cubicle and stared.
“You have two TVs,” she said.
“They’re monitors. Computer screens.”
“Why do you need two?”
“Because I look at a lot of numbers at once.”
Becca considered this.
“Do you watch cartoons on them?”
“No.”
“Not even on your lunch?”
“I don’t really take lunch, baby.”
She frowned at me. But she didn’t say anything.
Not yet.
I introduced her to my coworkers.
Diane, who sits in the cubicle next to me. Sixty-one. Purchasing. She’s been at Heartland for thirty years. She has three grandkids and a jar of Werther’s Originals on her desk.
“Well, aren’t you the prettiest thing,” Diane said.
“I know,” Becca said.
Diane laughed so hard she had to sit down.
Marcus, from the warehouse. Twenty-eight. Big. Gentle. He’d brought his son, Jaylen, who was seven. Jaylen had a toy forklift.
Becca and Jaylen looked at each other for a long moment.
“Can I see your forklift?” Becca asked.
“Can I see your rabbit?” Jaylen asked.
They traded.
They were best friends for the rest of the day.
Priya, from IT. Thirty-five. She’d brought her twin daughters. Nine. They were wearing matching T-shirts that said FUTURE ENGINEERS.
They showed Becca how to make a paper airplane.
I set her up beside me in my cubicle.
I pulled over an extra chair. I spread out her crayons and her coloring book and her unicorn notebook on the corner of my desk. I opened her granola bar. I put the straw in her juice box.
“Okay,” I said. “Mommy has to work now. You can color. And draw. And if you need anything, just tap my arm. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Quiet like a mouse.”
“Quiet like a mouse who’s asleep,” Becca said.
She was fascinated by everything.
My two monitors. She watched the numbers scroll by on the spreadsheets like they were a movie.
The printer. Every time it whirred and spit out a page, she clapped.
The phone. Every time it rang, she jumped.
But mostly, she was fascinated by the people.
Because people kept stopping at my desk.
All morning.
They always do. I just never noticed how much.
At 8:30, Diane leaned over the cubicle wall.
“Kristen, I’m getting a weird number on the syringe order for Methodist. Can you look?”
I looked. I fixed it.
At 8:52, Marcus came up from the warehouse.
“Hey, Kris, the receiving dock’s saying we’ve got two pallets of gauze that aren’t on the manifest. Can you check the system?”
I checked. I found it. Purchasing had entered it under the wrong vendor code. I fixed it.
At 9:15, a woman named Carol from Customer Service called.
“Kristen, Bryan Health in Lincoln says they ordered four hundred cases of exam gloves and only got three hundred. Do you know what happened?”
I looked. We’d shorted them because of a stockout at the supplier. I called the supplier. I found another warehouse in Des Moines with the gloves. I arranged a transfer.
At 9:40, Priya from IT stopped by.
“Kristen, the new inventory software’s throwing an error on the reorder screen. Do you know what it’s doing?”
I knew. I’d told them three weeks ago it would do that. I showed her how to fix it.
At 10:10, a guy named Doug from Purchasing.
At 10:25, Diane again.
At 10:50, Marcus again.
At 11:15, a woman from Accounting I’d never met, who said somebody told her I’d know where the old vendor contracts were filed.
I knew.
Becca watched all of it.
She didn’t say anything. She just colored. And watched.
Every time somebody came to my desk, she looked up. She watched them ask me something. She watched me answer. She watched them walk away.
At one point, after Doug from Purchasing left, she put down her crayon.
She looked at me.
“Mommy,” she said. “Do you tell everybody what to do here?”
I laughed.
“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”
“But everybody asks you stuff,” Becca said.
“That’s just because I know where things are.”
“Then why aren’t you the boss?”
I didn’t have an answer.
So I said, “Eat your granola bar.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she ate her granola bar.
But she kept watching.
By lunchtime, she’d met most of my team.
Including my boss.
James came out of his office at 11:30.
He walked over to my cubicle. He was holding a mug of coffee. Wearing his navy cardigan. His reading glasses were pushed up on top of his head.
He looked down at Becca.
“You must be Becca,” he said.
Becca looked up at him.
Way up. James is six-four.
“Are you the boss?” she asked.
James smiled.
“I’m one of them,” he said.
Becca studied him.
“You’re very tall,” she said.
“I am.”
“Do you bump your head?”
“Sometimes,” James said. “On the door to the supply closet. Every single time.”
Becca laughed.
James was surprisingly good with her.
He crouched down so he was eye level with her. His knees cracked. He asked about her drawing. She’d drawn a horse. Or a dog. It was hard to tell.
“It’s a horse-dog,” Becca said. “It’s both.”
“That’s the best kind,” James said.
He gave her a pad of sticky notes from his pocket. Bright yellow.
“For your art,” he said.
Becca stuck one on her forehead.
He took her into his office.
He let her draw on his whiteboard. With the colored markers. She drew a sun. A house. A tree. And a very tall stick figure next to the house.
“Is that me?” James asked.
“It’s you,” Becca said. “You’re bumping your head on the sun.”
James laughed so hard his reading glasses fell off his head.
Then he showed her the bowl of candy on his desk.
Peppermints and butterscotch. In a glass bowl shaped like a fish.
“You can have one,” he said. “If your mom says it’s okay.”
Becca looked at me through the open office door.
I nodded.
She picked a butterscotch.
She unwrapped it very carefully. She put it in her mouth.
“This is the best candy I’ve ever had in my whole life,” she said.
James looked pleased.
Then I got a call.
It was 1:15. Becca and I had just come back from lunch in the break room. She’d had a peanut butter sandwich. I’d had a sleeve of saltine crackers from the vending machine.
My desk phone rang.
It was the purchasing director at Nebraska Medicine. The biggest hospital system in the state. Our biggest customer.
“Kristen,” she said. “We’ve got a problem. A big one.”
Their surgical supply order hadn’t shipped. Six hundred cases of sterile surgical drapes and gowns. They had eleven surgeries scheduled for tomorrow morning. If the supplies didn’t arrive by six a.m., they’d have to cancel them.
Eleven surgeries. Eleven people waiting for heart bypasses and knee replacements and cancer resections.
I had to fix it.
Now.
It was supposed to take five minutes.
It didn’t.
The conversation got complicated. The order was stuck in a system error. The warehouse had the drapes but couldn’t release them because of a lot number problem. I had to get the warehouse manager, the IT guy, and the purchasing director from Nebraska Medicine on a conference call together.
I had to step into the conference room down the hall.
I looked at Becca.
She was coloring at my desk. Her horse-dog. Mr. Buttons sitting next to her.
I couldn’t take her into a conference call with a hospital system and a warehouse manager and IT.
I looked around.
Diane was at a meeting. Marcus was in the warehouse. Priya had taken her twins to see the server room.
I looked at James’s office.
The door was open. He was at his desk. Reading something.
I knocked on his door frame.
“James,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve got a crisis with Nebraska Medicine. The surgical drapes. I have to get on a call. Could Becca sit in your office? Just for a few minutes?”
James looked up.
“Of course,” he said. “Go. We’ll be fine.”
He looked past me at Becca.
“Becca,” he said. “Want to come draw on the whiteboard some more?”
Becca jumped out of her chair so fast she knocked over her juice box.
I got her settled in James’s office.
In the chair across from his desk. With her crayons and her unicorn notebook and Mr. Buttons.
“Be good,” I said. “Be quiet. Mommy will be right back.”
“Quiet like a mouse,” Becca said.
“Quiet like a mouse who’s asleep,” I said.
I kissed her on the head.
I left.
It took twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes on the phone in the conference room. Yelling a little. Pleading a little. Finally getting the IT guy to override the lot number lock. Getting the warehouse manager to pull the drapes off the shelf. Getting a driver to load them onto a truck.
The truck left Heartland at 1:41 p.m.
It would reach Nebraska Medicine by four.
Eleven surgeries would happen tomorrow.
I hung up.
I put my head down on the conference room table for a second.
Then I went to get my daughter.
When I came back, Becca was sitting in James’s chair.
His big leather desk chair. Behind his desk. Her feet dangling a foot above the floor. She was drawing a picture. On a piece of yellow construction paper. Concentrating hard. Her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
James was standing by the window.
Looking out at the parking lot.
His arms were crossed. His reading glasses were in his hand.
The second I walked in, he looked at me strangely.
Not angry.
Just thoughtful.
Like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
James didn’t answer right away.
He looked at Becca. Then back at me.
“Everything’s fine,” he said.
But his voice was different. Quieter.
And he didn’t stop looking at me.
Becca slid off the chair.
She grabbed my hand.
“Mommy, I made you a picture,” she said.
“I see that. Can I look at it?”
“It’s not done yet,” Becca said. “I’m giving it to Mr. James.”
She put the yellow construction paper face down on his desk.
“For you,” she said to James. “So you remember.”
James looked at the paper.
“Thank you, Becca,” he said quietly.
Becca pulled me out of his office.
Back to my desk.
I looked back once.
James had picked up the drawing. He was looking at it. Standing by the window. Holding it in both hands.
He didn’t move.
I didn’t think much about it after that.
Becca spent the rest of the afternoon with Jaylen and the toy forklift. Priya’s twins taught her how to make a paper airplane that flew all the way across the break room. Diane gave her a Werther’s Original. Marcus let her sit on an actual forklift in the warehouse. With the engine off.
At four-thirty, we drove home.
She fell asleep in the car before we got out of the parking lot.
That night, I asked her about it.
At bedtime. She was in her pajamas. The ones with the rainbows. Mr. Buttons under her arm.
“Becca,” I said. “When you were in Mr. James’s office. What did you guys talk about?”
She yawned.
“Stuff,” she said.
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just stuff, Mommy.”
“Did you tell him anything?”
“I told him a lot of things,” Becca said. “He asked me a lot of questions.”
My stomach dropped.
“What kind of questions?”
But Becca was already asleep.
I lay awake for an hour.
He asked me a lot of questions.
I told him a lot of things.
Oh, God.
What did she tell him?
About Sunday nights? About the kitchen table? About the bad words at the computer?
About his spreadsheet?
I didn’t sleep much that week.
Every time James walked past my desk, I braced myself.
He didn’t say anything.
He was normal. Friendly. Good morning, Kristen. Thanks for handling Nebraska Medicine. That was a save.
But he looked at me differently.
I caught him once. Standing in his office doorway. Watching me answer a question for Diane.
He didn’t look away when I saw him.
He just nodded.
And went back inside.
Then, the following Wednesday, he sent me an email.
Kristen — Can you come to my office at 2? — J.
That was it.
No subject line. No explanation.
I immediately assumed something was wrong.
I’d been fired once. In 2018. From a call center job. The email that came before it looked exactly like that. Can you come to my office.
I sat at my desk and shook.
I thought about the daycare bill. Eleven hundred dollars. Due on the first.
I thought about the rent. Fourteen hundred. Due on the fifth.
I thought about Becca.
At 1:58, I walked to his office.
At 2:00, I knocked on the door frame.
“Come in, Kristen,” James said. “Close the door.”
I closed the door.
I sat down across from his desk.
In the same chair Becca sat in. With her crayons. A week ago.
James took off his reading glasses.
He folded his hands on the desk.
“Kristen,” he said. “I wanted to let you know that the company is increasing your salary.”
I stared at him.
“Effective next pay period,” James said. “Twenty-two percent.”
I honestly thought he was joking.
I actually laughed. A short, nervous laugh.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Twenty-two percent,” James said. “From sixty-one thousand to seventy-four thousand five hundred.”
I didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t.
“And there’s more,” James said. “But we’ll get to that.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t ask for a raise.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t had a performance review. Not since last fall.”
“I know.”
“So why?” I said. “Why now?”
James leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“Because your daughter said something to me last week.”
I just stared at him.
“What did she say?”
James reached over to the corner of his desk.
There was a piece of paper lying face down next to his keyboard. Yellow construction paper. Crumpled at the edges.
He turned it over.
He slid it across the desk to me.
“She said a lot of things,” he said quietly. “But mostly, she drew this.”
I looked down at the drawing.
It was a kitchen.
I knew it was our kitchen because of the taco magnet on the refrigerator. She’d drawn it. A yellow taco. Very carefully.
There was a table. A brown rectangle. With a gray square on it. A laptop. With little lines on the screen. Numbers.
And at the table, a woman.
Brown hair in a messy bun. A purple coffee mug. The one I use. With the chip in the handle.
