Succession Planning is available on August 28th, 2026. You can preorder it on Kindle here or on your book store of choice that's not Amazon here.
There's a particular kind of pizza they order at the end of things; flat and lukewarm, from a chain that keeps a standing discount for local businesses. I ate four slices of it at my own going-away party and didn't taste any of them.
The break room at the old store smelled the way break rooms always smell: burnt coffee and the ghost of someone's microwaved fish from two weeks ago. We had eaten hundreds of lunches in that room. I had done homework there, applied to jobs from my phone hidden under the table, had the kind of small, meandering conversations that leave no mark on you individually but which, in aggregate, constitute several years of your life. I was twenty-two years old and it had been two years of mine.
"So Nick, it's really your last day?" Marcus said. He was one of the older guys, with the company since high school, which in his case meant he'd worked there for eleven years. He said this the way you say most true things at going-away parties: with the inflection of a question, as though the leaving were still somehow negotiable.
"Graduation's next week," I said. "I need time to pack."
"You're moving back home?"
"Just for a bit. Until I can get something in my field." I was a soon-to-be journalism graduate with a journalism degree and precisely zero journalism experience outside working for my collegiate paper, which is the condition of most journalism graduates. "I've been applying. Nothing's called back yet but it's only been a few months."
"You're transferring down though," he said. "So you won't be unemployed right away. That's something."
I laughed because it was the right thing to do. "Yeah, exactly. It's just easier than starting fresh somewhere." I heard myself saying this and felt, even then, the small dry click of something fitting into place. Easier than starting fresh. That was the engine of the whole thing, I think. I just didn't know it yet.
My manager, Kenneth, stopped by as we were cleaning up the boxes. He was a decent man; recently promoted, which had made him slightly more formal and slightly more sympathetic in equal measure. The way a little authority tends to make people who aren't sure what to do with their newfound power.
He handed me a business card with something scrawled in ink on the back. "Store manager's name is Colleen. Just call her when you're settled in after the move. You might have to go in for a quick interview, same as when you transferred to us."
"Same process," I said.
"Exactly. I don't know this woman personally, so I can't warn you what she's like. Just be pleasant."
"I'm a ray of sunshine," I said.
Kenneth gave me the look he always gave me when I said things like that, a sort of resigned amusement. The expression of a man who had long since accepted what he was dealing with. "Cut back on the sarcasm when you meet her. I have a feeling she won't find it as charming as I do."
I told him I would. I didn't.
I drove home that night with the windows down and the radio off. My apartment, the last apartment I would have for the foreseeable future, the one that had been my apartment for two years, was mostly boxes by then. I had accumulated, as people do in college, a staggering amount of things I could not name a use for. Duplicates of everything. A blender I had used once. Three separate phone chargers for a phone I no longer owned. The physical residue of a person still deciding what kind of person he was.
I packed until my back hurt and then I sat on the bare mattress and looked at my phone. Three job applications pending. One from two months ago, which I had long stopped expecting to hear from. One from the previous week. One from this morning, submitted hastily between shifts, the cover letter a thing I was not proud of.
I thought about calling Michelle. I thought about it the way you think about things at eleven o'clock when you're tired and the apartment smells like cardboard, which is to say I thought about it long enough to feel as though I had done something about it, and then I put the phone face-down and lay back on the mattress.
That, in retrospect, is about as good a metaphor for the next several months as I can offer.