“I need to speak to you in the stockroom.”
He followed her into the stockroom with dread in his heart. What now?
She leaned against the pricing table in the center of the crowded room and pointed a finger at him, her voice shaking with barely suppressed rage. “First off, don’t you ever dare question me about inventory issues while we have guests in the shop.”
“Oh. Okay,” KJ said eagerly. “Sorry. I just—”
She raised her hand, palm out, like a traffic cop, to stop him.
“Second. You should know that from the beginning, I was against having you work here. I thought it was a bad look, hiring a member’s son, but I got overruled. And I’ll admit, until today, I had started to come around. You’re attractive, our guests seem to like you, and you seem to have a knack for the upsell.”
“Oh, uh, thanks. I think?”
Marcie had explained the art of upselling on his first day of work.
“Say you sell a pair of golf cleats. That’s a nice sale, right? Couple hundred bucks. But it’s not enough. Here’s what you do. You show the customer one of our custom-designed imported leather belts with the Saint logo. That’s a hundred twenty-five. You ask how he’s fixed for socks. No man has ever had enough socks. He’ll need one of our shoe totes too, to keep the cleats from getting dinged up. Then you show him the shirt selection. Tell him they just came in today and they’re flying out the door. Create a sense of urgency. And mention that if he buys two, he’s going to get one of our awesome stainless steel insulated travel coffee mugs. Thirty-dollar value.”
KJ had nodded enthusiastically, taking it all in, the way he’d never absorbed anything taught in his boring college classes.
“It’s like a game, see,” Marcie explained. “And now, you’ve taken a simple hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar purchase and upsold it to an easy six hundred dollars’ worth of add-ons. If you’ve done it correctly, your customer is going to actually be grateful for the chance to spend more money. And that, my friend, is called the upsell.”
Now KJ was watching Marcie’s face, waiting for the ax to fall.
He didn’t have to wait long. She raised a finger. “You need to understand, what goes on in this shop stays in this shop. Right?”
He was still puzzled. “I’m sorry. I don’t get it. If you’re mad about the sweaters, I counted them twice. I just thought you’d want to know we were missing a couple dozen. Because of how expensive they are and all. I wanted you to know…”
Her eyes narrowed. “So now I know, and that’s the end of this discussion.”
KJ nodded that he understood. He looked around for his messenger bag, getting ready to leave, but Marcie wasn’t finished.
“And KJ?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Since we’re letting each other know about stuff, I should let you know that I saw you, Tuesday night, leaving the Back Porch.”
He could feel the ice in his veins and the heat rising in his face. He forced himself to give her the patented dumb jock face he’d perfected over the years.
“Back Porch? Must have been somebody else. I’ve never heard of it. Never been there.”
She chuckled. “Oh, sweetie. It was you, all right. You had a ball cap pulled down over your face, but I recognized your walk. The slight limp when you favor your bad knee. And your shoes.”
Marcie pointed at the shoes he was wearing today. His favorites. The neon-gold-and-black Nikes with the Demon Deacon logo. “Pro tip, KJ. If you’re trolling a gay bar and you want to be incognito, go for something a little more understated.”
He was staring down at the damned shoes. Frozen in his tracks. When he looked up at her, he felt like he might puke.
“Don’t worry, hon,” she purred. “Your little secret is safe with me. I don’t judge. But your folks might. And your granddaddy? I know the man. He’d definitely judge, and I’m thinking he wouldn’t like knowing his grandson and namesake was a sneaky little queer.”
CHAPTER 25
Shannon’s supervisor, a sour-faced older woman named Ruth, stopped her as she was leaving her patient’s room. “You have a visitor downstairs.”
“Me? What kind of visitor? It’s not about Olivia, right?” She grabbed her phone from the pocket of her scrubs, but there were no recent texts or calls from her daughter.
“I’m not your receptionist, Shannon,” Ruth snapped. “All I know is there’s someone here to see you. I suggest you take your break and deal with it.”
“Understood,” Shannon said.
