The woman was frowning at the laptop. There were little lines coming off her head. The way kids draw when somebody is upset. Squiggles.
And there was a speech bubble coming out of her mouth.
Inside it, Becca had drawn a bunch of symbols. #@$%!
In the corner of the drawing, there was a window.
A black window. With a yellow moon and white stars.
Night.
And on the left side of the drawing, there was a staircase.
Brown lines. Going up.
And on the third step from the bottom, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chin, holding a gray rabbit, was a little girl.
With curly brown hair.
Watching.
At the top of the drawing, in big, wobbly letters, the kind she copies from her name, Becca had written something.
Letters she’d had to ask somebody to spell.
MOMY DUZ YOR HOMWERK
I couldn’t breathe.
“She asked me how to spell homework,” James said quietly. “And does. And your. She already knew Mommy. Mostly.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Kristen,” James said. “Can I tell you what happened? In my office? While you were on the call with Nebraska Medicine?”
I nodded.
I couldn’t speak.
“She was drawing on the whiteboard for a while,” James said. “Then she got bored. She came over and sat in my chair. Which, by the way, I let her do. It was very important to her.”
He almost smiled.
“She looked at my computer,” he said. “I had the Weekly Demand Forecast open. I was getting ready for Gary’s call on Friday. The big spreadsheet. With all the tabs.”
My stomach dropped.
“She pointed at it,” James said. “And she said, That’s the one Mommy fixes.”
I closed my eyes.
“I said, What do you mean, Becca?” James said. “And she said—”
He paused.
“She said, That’s the one Mommy fixes on Sundays. After I go to bed. She makes coffee and she sits at the table and she says bad words at it. I’m not supposed to be awake. But I sit on the stairs and watch.”
I couldn’t look at him.
“I asked her how long Mommy’s been fixing it,” James said. “She said, Since I was four. And I’m five now. So that’s forever.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I asked her why Mommy fixes it,” he said. “And she said—”
He stopped.
His voice had gotten rough.
“She said, Because Mommy says if she doesn’t, the hospitals won’t have the stuff they need. And people will get hurt. And Mommy says it’s not her job, but somebody has to do it.”
I started crying.
Right there. In James’s office. With the door closed.
I put my face in my hands.
“I didn’t believe her,” James said quietly. “At first. I thought she was confused. Five-year-olds say a lot of things.”
He leaned forward.
“So after you left that day, I went into the shared drive,” he said. “And I looked at the version history. On the Demand Forecast.”
He turned his monitor around so I could see.
On the screen was a list. A file history. Hundreds of entries.
Edited by J. Whitlock — Sunday, 8:04 PM.
Edited by K. Albee — Sunday, 9:17 PM.
Edited by K. Albee — Sunday, 10:42 PM.
Edited by K. Albee — Sunday, 11:58 PM.
Edited by J. Whitlock — Monday, 7:31 AM.
Every single week.
For eighteen months.
“Every Sunday,” James said. “Every single Sunday since October of 2022. I save it at eight. You open it at nine. You work on it until midnight. Sometimes one in the morning. Then I open it Monday morning and send it to Gary.”
He turned the monitor back.
“And Gary sends me emails,” he said. “Telling me what a great job I’m doing. How accurate the forecasts are. How we haven’t had a stockout in eighteen months.”
He looked at me.
“And I believed him,” he said. “I thought it was me.”
“James,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I should have said something. I just—I didn’t know how. I didn’t want you to think I was trying to make you look bad. I didn’t want—”
“Kristen,” James said. “Stop.”
I stopped.
“You’re apologizing to me?” he said. “You’ve been rebuilding my work every Sunday night for a year and a half. For free. While I took the credit. And you’re apologizing to me?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Your daughter told me some other things too,” James said.
My heart stopped.
“What other things?”
James picked up a sticky note from his desk.
One of the yellow ones he’d given Becca. Except this one had his handwriting on it. Small. Neat.
He’d written down what she said.
He read them to me.
“Mommy eats crackers for lunch because the good daycare costs too much,” he read.
I closed my eyes.
“Mommy says she can’t ask for more money because then the boss might think she’s greedy and not like her anymore,” he read.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“My daddy left. Mommy says that’s why she has to do everything perfect. So nobody else leaves.”
James put down the sticky note.
The office was completely silent.
“That one,” James said quietly. “That last one. That’s the one I couldn’t stop thinking about.”
He looked at the drawing on the desk.
At the little girl on the stairs.
“I stood at that window for twenty minutes,” he said. “After she said it. While you were on the phone saving eleven surgeries at Nebraska Medicine.”
His voice cracked.
“And I thought about my mother,” he said.
I looked up.
“My mother was a single mom,” James said. “In Council Bluffs. Right across the river. My father left when I was three.”
He looked out the window.
“She worked at the Union Pacific railyard office,” he said. “Billing clerk. For twenty-six years. She knew more about how that office ran than anybody in it. Every manager she ever had asked her questions. All day. Every day.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“She never got promoted,” he said. “Not once. In twenty-six years. She trained six different managers. Every one of them younger than her. Every one of them a man. Every one of them made twice what she made.”
“I used to sit on the stairs too,” James said.
I stared at him.
“At night,” he said. “When I was little. My mother would sit at the kitchen table after I went to bed. With a pot of coffee. And a stack of ledgers. Doing the books for the railyard. Fixing her boss’s mistakes. Because if she didn’t, the trains wouldn’t get paid for. And men would lose their jobs.”
He swallowed.
“I’d sit on the stairs in my pajamas,” he said. “And watch her. And she’d say bad words at the ledgers. Polish ones. Because she thought I didn’t know Polish.”
He almost smiled.
“I knew Polish,” he said.
“I asked her once,” James said. “When I was about ten. Why she didn’t ask for more money. Why she didn’t tell her boss she was doing his job.”
“What did she say?”
James looked at me.
“She said, Jimmy, if I ask, they might say no. And then they might think I’m trouble. And then they might let me go. And then who takes care of you?”
I couldn’t speak.
“She died in 2009,” James said. “Still a billing clerk. Twenty-six years. She never asked. Not once.”
He picked up Becca’s drawing.
He looked at it for a long time.
“And then last week,” he said quietly, “a five-year-old girl sat in my chair and drew me a picture of my mother.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
“Kristen,” James said finally. “I’ve been the director of operations for nine years. And I’ve been the worst kind of boss. Not the mean kind. The blind kind.”
“James, you’re a good boss. You’re the best boss I’ve ever—”
“I’m a nice boss,” James said. “That’s not the same thing. I let you leave early for fevers. I keep candy on my desk. I say family first.”
He shook his head.
“And I never once looked at what you were actually doing,” he said. “Every day. Out there. Diane asks you. Marcus asks you. Priya asks you. Customer service asks you. Accounting asks you. Nebraska Medicine calls you. Not me. You.”
He looked at the drawing.
“Your daughter figured it out in four hours,” he said. “Do you tell everybody what to do here? She asked you that. You told her no.”
He looked at me.
“You were wrong,” he said.
“So I went to Kansas City,” James said.
I stared at him.
“On Monday,” he said. “I drove down. Three hours. I walked into Gary Hensley’s office. And I showed him the version history.”
My stomach dropped.
“James—”
“I told him everything,” James said. “That the forecast he’s been praising for eighteen months isn’t mine. That I didn’t even know my own spreadsheet was broken. That an inventory analyst making sixty-one thousand dollars a year has been rebuilding it every Sunday night at her kitchen table. For free. After her five-year-old goes to bed.”
“What did he say?”
James almost laughed.
“He was quiet for about two minutes,” he said. “Then he said, Are you telling me I’ve been sending you thank-you emails for her work?”
“And?”
“And I said yes,” James said. “And then I showed him your daughter’s drawing.”
I put my face in my hands.
“You showed the Vice President Becca’s drawing?”
“I did,” James said. “MOMY DUZ YOR HOMWERK.”
He shook his head.
“Gary has two daughters,” James said. “He looked at that drawing for a long time. Then he picked up his phone and called HR.”
James opened a folder on his desk.
He slid a piece of paper across to me.
A letter. On Heartland Medical Supply letterhead. Signed by Gary Hensley.
OFFER OF PROMOTION.
I read it three times.
Position: Manager, Demand Planning & Inventory Analytics.
Reports to: Director of Operations.
Salary: $74,500, effective immediately. Increasing to $82,000 upon completion of 90-day transition.
Responsibilities: Full ownership of the Weekly Demand Forecast and all inventory planning functions for the Midwest region.
Retroactive bonus: $9,000, in recognition of uncompensated work performed October 2022 – April 2024.
“Nine thousand dollars,” I whispered.
“Seventy-eight Sundays,” James said. “Three hours each. Gary did the math himself. He said it’s not enough. He said it’s what HR would approve without a fight. He’s fighting for more.”
I sat there holding the letter.
I couldn’t stop shaking.
“James,” I said. “Why didn’t you just give me the raise? Why go to Gary? Why tell him it wasn’t you? You could’ve kept the credit. Nobody would’ve known.”
James looked at me.
“Your daughter would’ve known,” he said.
“She’s going to grow up,” James said. “And someday she’s going to ask you. Mommy, did your boss ever find out? About Sunday nights?”
He picked up the drawing.
“And I want you to be able to tell her yes,” he said. “I want you to tell her he found out. And he made it right. And he told the truth even though it made him look bad.”
He put the drawing down.
“Because nobody ever did that for my mother,” he said.
I started crying again.
James slid the box of tissues across the desk.
“Also,” he said. “There’s one more condition. Gary insisted. It’s in the letter. Page two.”
I turned the page.
Condition of employment: The Weekly Demand Forecast shall be completed during standard business hours, Monday–Friday. Under no circumstances is this employee to perform work on this report on evenings or weekends.
I laughed.
Through my tears.
“He put that in the letter?”
“He put that in the letter,” James said. “He said if he sees your name in the version history on a Sunday night ever again, he’s firing you.”
He paused.
“He was joking,” James said. “I think.”
“And one more thing,” James said.
He reached into his desk drawer.
He took out a key card. A new one. White plastic. With my photo on it.
KRISTEN ALBEE — MANAGER.
And under it, a key.
A brass key.
“For the office next to mine,” James said. “It’s been empty since Doug Phelps retired in 2021. It has a door. And a window. And a little couch.”
He set it on the desk.
“Room for a kid to sit,” he said. “On Bring Your Kid to Work Day. Or a sick day. Or a snow day when Little Sprouts closes. She can sit in there and draw. Instead of on the stairs.”
I picked up the key.
I couldn’t say anything at all.
I walked out of James’s office at 2:47.
Diane looked up from her cubicle.
“Kristen? Honey? Are you okay? You’ve been crying.”
I couldn’t explain.
I just held up the letter.
Diane read it.
She stood up. She came around the cubicle wall. She put her arms around me.
“About damn time,” she said into my hair. “About damn time, sweetheart.”
Marcus found out. Then Priya. Then the whole second floor.
By three-thirty, there was a sheet cake in the break room from the Hy-Vee across the street. Chocolate with white frosting. Somebody had written on it in blue gel.
CONGRATS BOSS LADY.
Marcus had written it. He spelled congrats with two T’s.
Nobody fixed it.
I picked Becca up from Little Sprouts at 5:40.
Five minutes early. For the first time in two years.
She was in the reading corner with Miss Darla. When she saw me in the doorway, her whole face lit up.
“Mommy! You’re early!”
She ran across the room. She threw her arms around my legs.
“Why are you early?”
I knelt down.
I took her face in my hands.
“Because of you,” I said.
She looked confused.
“What did I do?”
“You drew Mr. James a picture,” I said.
Becca’s eyes went wide.
Then her face crumpled.
“Am I in trouble?” she whispered. “I wasn’t supposed to tell. About the stairs. And the bad words. I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry. I just—he asked—”
“Becca,” I said. “Baby. You’re not in trouble.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” I said. “You got Mommy a new job.”
She stared at me.
“A new job?”
“A better one,” I said. “I’m going to be a manager. With my own office. With a door. And a window. And a little couch.”
Becca’s mouth fell open.
“Are you the boss now?”
I laughed.
“I’m one of them,” I said.
We went to dinner that night.
Not at home. At a restaurant.
The Spaghetti Works in the Old Market. Becca’s favorite. She’d been there once. For her fifth birthday. She talks about it constantly. The red checkered tablecloths. The breadsticks. The ice cream sundae at the end.
We’d only gone once because it costs forty dollars for the two of us.
We went that night.
Becca ordered spaghetti with meatballs. And a Shirley Temple. And the sundae.
I ordered the lasagna.
A real lunch. A real dinner. Not crackers.
Becca watched me eat it.
She watched every bite.
“Mommy,” she said finally. “You’re eating a whole thing.”
“I am.”
“Not crackers.”
“Not crackers.”
She thought about that.
“Is that because of the new job?”
I put down my fork.
“Becca,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“How long have you been sitting on the stairs?”
She looked down at her spaghetti.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Every Sunday,” she said finally. Very quietly.
“Every Sunday?”
“Since I was four,” she said. “I hear the coffee thing. The beep. And I wake up. And I go to the stairs. And I watch.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
She looked up at me.
“Because you’d make me go back to bed,” she said. “And then you’d be alone.”
I couldn’t speak.
“You look sad on Sundays, Mommy,” Becca said. “At the computer. You put your head down on the table sometimes. And you rub your eyes. And one time you cried.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“So I sit on the stairs,” Becca said. “So you’re not alone. Even if you don’t know I’m there.”
I got up from my side of the booth.
I went around to her side.
I sat down next to my daughter. I put my arms around her.
I held her in the middle of the Spaghetti Works in the Old Market with marinara sauce on her chin.
“Thank you,” I whispered into her curly hair. “Thank you for sitting on the stairs.”
“You’re welcome, Mommy.”
“But Becca,” I said. “You don’t have to anymore.”
She pulled back. She looked up at me.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to sit at the kitchen table on Sunday nights anymore,” I said. “My new boss says I’m not allowed.”
Becca’s eyes went wide.
“Mr. James says?”
“Mr. James’s boss says,” I said. “It’s in a letter. In writing.”
Becca thought about that.
“Then what are we going to do on Sundays?”
I looked at my daughter.
Five years old. With a gap in her teeth and marinara sauce on her chin and a stuffed rabbit named Mr. Buttons tucked in the booth next to her.
Who’d been sitting on a staircase at night for a year and a half.
So I wouldn’t be alone.
“Whatever you want,” I said.
That was a year ago.
I’m the Manager of Demand Planning and Inventory Analytics at Heartland Medical Supply now.
I have an office. With a door. And a window that looks out at the warehouse. And a little couch.
I have two analysts who report to me. Priya transferred over from IT. And a young guy named DeShawn who just graduated from UNO. I’m teaching him how to build a demand forecast. The right way. With seasonal adjustments.
We do it on Tuesdays. During business hours.
Gary Hensley got me more than nine thousand dollars.
He fought HR for three months. In August, a check came. Retroactive pay. For seventy-eight Sundays.
Twenty-one thousand, four hundred dollars.
He called me himself when it went through.
“Kristen,” he said. “Tell your daughter I said thank you. For the drawing.”
“I will.”
“I have it framed,” Gary said. “In my office. In Kansas City. James made me a copy.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Every manager who comes into my office,” Gary said, “I make them look at it. I make them read it. MOMY DUZ YOR HOMWERK.”
He paused.
“And then I ask them,” he said, “Who’s doing your homework?”
He told me later that it worked.
Three other offices found people. In Kansas City. In Des Moines. In Wichita.
A woman in Accounts Receivable in Wichita who’d been reconciling her director’s books every weekend for four years.
A man in Logistics in Des Moines who’d been rebuilding his manager’s route maps every night for two years.
A night-shift supervisor in Kansas City who’d been training every new day-shift manager for six years. Without ever being promoted.
All three got promotions.
All three got back pay.
Gary calls it the Becca Rule.
James is still my boss.
He’s still the Director of Operations. He still has the candy bowl shaped like a fish. He still bumps his head on the supply closet door.
But he’s different.
He walks the floor now. Every morning. At nine. He stops at every desk. He doesn’t ask how’s it going. He asks what are you working on that nobody knows about?
People started telling him.
He started fixing it.
He has Becca’s drawing on his wall.
The original. Framed. Right next to his door. Where everybody can see it when they walk in.
Under it, he put a small brass plaque.
In memory of Helen Whitlock. Billing Clerk. Union Pacific. 1957–1983. Who did everybody’s homework. And never asked.
I asked him once why he put his mother’s name on Becca’s drawing.
He was quiet for a long time.
“Because it’s the same picture,” he said finally. “The kitchen table. The coffee. The bad words. The kid on the stairs.”
He looked at it.
“My mother never got her raise,” he said. “But Becca’s mom did.”
He looked at me.
“I figure that counts for something,” he said.
We spend Sundays differently now.
The first Sunday after the promotion, Becca woke up at seven o’clock in the morning. She came into my room. She climbed into my bed.
“Mommy,” she whispered. “It’s Sunday.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to do the homework?”
“No.”
“Not even tonight?”
“Not even tonight.”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“Then what are we doing?”
“You tell me,” I said.
She thought about it for a long time.
“The zoo,” she said.
We went to the zoo.
The Henry Doorly Zoo. On the south side of Omaha. One of the best zoos in the country. Becca had been once. On a field trip with Little Sprouts. She talked about it for a month.
We’d never gone together. It’s twenty-nine dollars for an adult. Nineteen for a kid.
We went that Sunday.
We saw the gorillas. The penguins. The jellyfish in the aquarium. The desert dome with the bats. We ate hot dogs for lunch. Becca got a stuffed penguin from the gift shop. She named him Mr. Buttons Junior.
We stayed until closing.
She fell asleep in the car before we got out of the parking lot.
The next Sunday, she picked the library.
The Sunday after that, the park by Lake Manawa.
The Sunday after that, she wanted to make pancakes. Shaped like animals. We made a horse-dog. It didn’t look like a horse or a dog. She said it was perfect.
We haven’t missed a Sunday in a year.
Last Thursday was Bring Your Kid to Work Day again.
Becca’s six now. She’s in first grade. She can read. A little. She can write her name and Mommy and James and horse-dog.
She wore her purple dress again. It’s too short now. She didn’t care.
She brought Mr. Buttons. And Mr. Buttons Junior.
I showed her my new office.
The door. The window. The little couch.
She stood in the doorway and stared.
“This is yours?”
“It’s mine.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
She walked over to the window. She looked out at the warehouse. At the trucks pulling in and out. At the forklifts.
“Mommy,” she said. “Do you tell everybody what to do now?”
I laughed.
“Some of them,” I said.
She spent the morning on the little couch.
Drawing.
People still stopped by. Diane. Marcus. DeShawn. Priya. They still asked me questions.
But now, when they left, they said thank you.
And now, when Becca looked up from her drawing and asked, “Mommy, why does everybody ask you stuff?” I didn’t say because I know where things are.
I said, “Because I’m good at my job, baby.”
At lunchtime, James came by.
He knocked on my door frame. He crouched down in front of the couch. His knees cracked.
“Becca,” he said. “You got tall.”
“You’re still taller,” Becca said.
“I am,” James said. “Still bump my head on the closet.”
Becca laughed.
“I have something for you,” James said.
He reached into his cardigan pocket.
He took out a butterscotch candy. From the fish bowl.
And a folded piece of paper.
He handed her both.
Becca unwrapped the candy first. Very carefully. She put it in her mouth.
Then she unfolded the paper.
She looked at it for a long time.
She was reading. Slowly. Sounding out the words. Moving her lips.
It was a drawing.
Not a good one. James can’t draw.
It was a kitchen. A brown rectangle for a table. And at the table, nobody.
Just an empty chair.
And a window with a sun in it. Daytime.
And a staircase. With nobody on it.
And at the top of the drawing, in James’s careful handwriting:
MOMMY DOESN’T DO MY HOMEWORK ANYMORE.
I DO MY OWN.
THANK YOU, BECCA.
— MR. JAMES
Becca looked at the drawing.
She looked at James.
She looked at me.
“There’s nobody on the stairs,” she said.
“Nope,” James said.
“Because Mommy’s not at the table.”
“That’s right.”
“Because you do your own homework now.”
“Every Sunday,” James said. “At my kitchen table. With coffee. Sometimes I say bad words at it.”
He winked at her.
“In Polish,” he said.
Becca laughed so hard the butterscotch almost fell out of her mouth.
Then she did something I didn’t expect.
She got off the couch.
She walked over to James. Still crouched down in front of her.
And she hugged him.
Around the neck. Her whole body. The way she hugs me at the door of Little Sprouts.
James froze.
Then, slowly, he put his arms around her.
He held on for a long time.
When he let go, his eyes were wet.
He stood up. He cleared his throat.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a meeting.”
He walked toward the door.
He stopped.
He turned around.
“Becca,” he said. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Okay.”
“Last year,” James said. “In my office. You told me a lot of things. About your mom. About the stairs. About Sunday nights.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” James asked. “Why did you tell me all that? You didn’t even know me.”
Becca thought about it.
She took the butterscotch out of her mouth. She held it in her fingers. Sticky.
“Because you asked,” she said.
James stood very still in the doorway.
“Nobody else asked,” Becca said. “Everybody asks Mommy stuff. All day. But nobody ever asked about Mommy.”
She put the butterscotch back in her mouth.
“You did,” she said. Around the candy. “So I told you.”
James looked at her for a long time.
Then he looked at me.
He didn’t say anything.
He just nodded.
And he went to his meeting.
People ask me sometimes how I got promoted.
They expect a story about hard work. About asking for what you deserve. About negotiating. About knowing your worth.
And I tell them about that.
But mostly, I tell them about the stairs.
About a little girl in rainbow pajamas who heard the coffee maker beep every Sunday night. Who got out of bed. Who sat on the third step from the bottom. Holding a stuffed rabbit.
Watching her mother work.
So her mother wouldn’t be alone.
And about a tall man in a navy cardigan who used to sit on the stairs too. Fifty years ago. In Council Bluffs. Watching his own mother fix somebody else’s mistakes at a kitchen table. And say bad words in Polish.
Who never got to tell anybody.
Until a five-year-old sat in his chair and drew him a picture.
I worked for eighteen months without anyone knowing.
I thought that was the point. I thought if I did everything perfectly and never asked for anything and never made trouble, nobody would leave.
I was wrong.
Somebody was watching the whole time.
She was just too small to see from the kitchen table.
It only took one sentence.
Mommy does your homework.
But it took a five-year-old to say it.
Because the rest of us had learned to stay quiet.
And Becca never learned.
I hope she never does.
