ROZ

“Yup. That’s fucked.” The loose flap they’d been meaning to fix on the awning was now a tear halfway across the whole thing. The metal skeleton of the frame was exposed. The enormous pink neon cabbage of the Guadalupe Street Co-op logo shone in the daylight, looking like it had its skirt torn off in a bar fight. “I’ll call them to fix it.”

Kevin squinted at the damage. He said something but Roz’s brain was foggy. The sun shifted. The heat intensified. The wind was a blessing. Sunday shoppers streamed past, filling up the patio tables with dogs on leashes and children who wouldn’t sit still and college students in gym shorts and bed head chasing napkins, as though nothing had happened yesterday. And what had really happened? The generator kicked on. The rain, eventually, stopped.

“What was that you said?” Roz’s mouth was dry. She needed to pee. Breakfast turned in her stomach. She had gotten up early to feed Franklin, the rabbit who lived rent-free in their apartment, a nonnegotiable requirement of Molly moving in. Molly made the fruit salad they were supposed to have yesterday. Scrambled the tofu. Spoke in a gentle voice that made Roz’s chest burn with humiliation. Yesterday they walked home in rain so hard it hurt, clinging to each other in the wind, stripped off their wet clothes, took hot showers, ate their stir-fry, watched their sitcom, and went to bed. She woke up twice in the night to find her body wrapped around Molly’s, making both of them sweat. They had not talked about what happened with the staff.

Kevin’s hands slid from his skinny hips, tucked up under his long arms. He had the body of a dancer, Roz thought, but he’d studied nutrition and worked his way up at Whole Foods instead, though not so far up that he was saved from a round of layoffs a few years after Central Market opened. “If this is the worst of the damage, we got off pretty easy,” he repeated. “But we should talk to Shel. That sling.”

The GoFundMe was all over Roz’s socials, launched by Randy, who made a two-hundred-dollar donation. Yesterday, during the historic, unprecedented storm, one of my coworkers suffered an injury following direct orders from management, who refused to close the store and let us all get home safely. Obviously, none of us has health insurance and he needs our support. As though the cost of American health care was their fault. Roz wasn’t insured, either. Shel’s shoulder—she felt queasy. She would make a donation. It would blow over. This was her job, to absorb the consequences of making necessary but unpopular decisions.

Kevin tugged the bottom of his apron and patted the sweat along his hairline with a long finger. His little vitamin box rattled in his pocket. “Manny’s out all week taking care of his family in Beaumont. Sounds like they lost everything. I’ll have to rework the schedule.”

“I’ll take his Tuesday close if you take his Thursday open. We have a game Wednesday night. How much PTO does he have left?”

“None.”

“Hope he comes back.”

Kevin shrugged.

Inside, the sun settled from her eyes and the co-op resolved into its warm, friendly colors. Pop music jangled from the speakers. Roz timed her steps to the beat. Her first few days as floor manager, the smell of the place would hit her in her sleep—damp lettuce and granola dust and the coffee bar—and her eyes would bolt open, afraid of all of the thousands of ways she might fuck up. She was terrified she’d forget to lock the safe, or would set the alarm wrong and they’d be robbed, or that she’d misunderstood something about the thermostat and would start an electrical fire. Each morning she’d walk to work with her heart in her throat, sure the co-op wouldn’t be there when she rounded the corner, picturing the headlines: Beloved, Irreplaceable Austin Business Incinerated by Managerial Incompetence. But every time, there it was. An extension of her, there was no denying it, the way it didn’t feel like she fully woke up until she saw its beige stucco and gleaming windows.

For most of the staff, this was just a job. But do the simple math and jobs were most of the hours of a life. Roz had made a decision a long time ago, when she had no money and was putting on the red H-E-B staff shirt for the first time, that she could resent every second of her time on the clock, and her parents for cutting off her credit card, or she could claim a stake in the minutes of her own life by caring about what she did. The work was meaningful if you gave it meaning. She thought of people who sold shoes, or apps, or appliances, and thanked god she had found a business she could believe in: feeding people.

The co-op was not a place of limitless upward mobility and that just was what it was. What she secretly imagined, in the back of her mind as she walked to work and while she and Molly watched television, was a small shop of her own. The opportunity to build something, to shape it and guide it and watch it grow, the way her mother had done with her students and faculty. But the way the industry was built, the way consumers were trained to demand discounts and trust quantity over quality, even in organics, someone like Roz, whose whole adult career had been spent earning grocery store wages, could never afford it. So she’d settled in at the co-op, for better or for worse. And it really could be much, much worse.

Gracie gave her a wave as Roz passed the bulk aisle, a smile that could be interpreted as warm. Roz and the staff floated through their tensions. It was never all won or lost. They knew, at the end of the day, that she meant well. Most of them, at least.

She found her girlfriend at the hot bar. “Hey, babe.”

Molly dropped an empty steam tray with an alarming noise. Crumbs of soy chorizo scattered at her feet. “I’ll get the broom,” Roz said, willing customers to look away.

“No, sweetie, I got it.” Molly smiled hard, the cheap elastic band of the hairnet digging into her forehead. The first time Roz saw that smile Molly was standing right over there by the grab-and-go fridge during training, glancing at Roz as Kevin droned on about turning the bottles so that the labels faced forward. Roz had thought that smile was just for her. It turned out Molly gave her smile to everyone. Waitresses, dogs, gas station cashiers, grackles, screaming kids and tired moms. It was a shield she drew against the world to protect her from conflict. It made her good with customers.

Roz hated to admit that she actually needed that smile today, that she had come here looking for reassurance that she was not, in fact, the worst manager in the world.

Molly was a retail junkie, too, wearing name tags and aprons well into her thirties. She understood that food was not the co-op’s business. Their product was the experience of a space in which opportunity, hope, abundance, cheerful music, and invig-orating colors could distract a person from whatever was hap-pening beyond the sliding doors. This was not a novel theory. There were books about these things. Roz had read them. The ballooning of the American supermarket, she had explained to Molly during training, or maybe it was on one of their first dates, and the steroidal widening of its aisles and inventory only encouraged the small grocer’s ability to speak in a softer, more specific voice, to give the customer not only the feeling of opportunity, but the premium feelings of human connection and community, their core product. Molly understood when it was time to look a customer in the eye and smile. She emerged now from the kitchen with a broom and dustpan. The smell of tuna and red onion wafted from her, the faint burn of the store’s famous fried popcorn tofu, a comforting perfume. It had been a short-lived scandal when they got together. There was nothing in the employee handbook restricting them. Kevin had combed through the document himself. There’d been some noise about writing a new policy, but nothing came of it.

“So is it off with my head, or what? Everyone hate me?”

Molly swept, looking pretty even in a hairnet, the apron hugging the outline of her high waist and full hips, a knockout in cheap cotton. Roz wanted to sweep them both away, back to the apartment, and burrow in bed all day watching shows and snacking. Molly was exceptionally good at downtime. “I don’t know, I’ve been alone in the kitchen.”

“Shel’s in that sling.”

“It’s his roommate’s.”

“It’s not real?”

“Randy suggested it.”

“Of course.”

Molly had been impressed by Roz when they first started dating. “You’re in charge of so much,” she said during one of their first dinners together, shaking her head in wonder at all that Roz had to juggle in a day, the nonstop needs of staff, customers, and the inventory itself. Yes, Roz had confirmed, it was a lot of pressure, but it was worth it. People loved the Guadalupe Street Co-op and Roz loved keeping it that way. She had learned some things from her school principal mother about how to helm a community, hold its neutral space, absorbing her mother’s dexterous ability to pivot in a single day, often a single hour, from the demands of teenage students to tired faculty to unruly parents. Roz learned how to work harder and longer than you thought you could, because there was a tangible human impact on the other side of all of that effort, lives you could affect. Roz had been important in Molly’s eyes. What did her girlfriend think of her now?

“Roz.” Eleanor, wearing her summer uniform of khaki cargo shorts and a black fleece vest zipped up over a co-op t-shirt, planted her feet at the end of the salad bar. “Office.”

Kevin was already leaning against the wall-length desk with his reporter’s notebook turned to a fresh page. There was only room for one chair in the narrow room and it went to Eleanor.

Their boss sat back, her face tight, but that could mean anything. Roz was pretty sure Eleanor had invented resting bitch face. “What happened yesterday?”

“Storm came on quick,” Roz said, though they had been tracking it all week. Wait and see, Eleanor kept saying. In the end, they hadn’t prepared for any scenario.

Eleanor shifted. “I have six emails from angry customers saying they were trapped in here. Shel filed an incident report. So I’ll ask again.” She looked from Roz to Kevin back to Roz, a slow and deliberate swivel. Active bitch face. They were in trouble. “What the hell happened yesterday?”

Sweat crowded Roz’s armpits. Six angry emails. Eleanor had once fired someone for a bad Google review.

Kevin spoke, measured and slow, with his eyes on the floor. “Losing power scared everyone. Customers rushed the door, which wouldn’t open. Shel forced it. People pushed him to get out. He banged his shoulder in the process.”

“Try again.” Eleanor held out her phone. “Shel sent this with his email. He said Zoey took it.” She tapped play. The small room’s temperature rose. Roz didn’t remember anyone recording.

Shaky footage. Zoey didn’t have a steady hand and the lights had already gone out. Roz’s voice was harsher than she remembered. Shel! Get the doors open. Now! And there was Shel, struggling under the crush of customers. And then the moment when the doors parted, Shel lifted off his feet. Eleanor turned up the sound on Roz’s grating voice. Clean up these carts. Refrigerate the perishables.

Eleanor cut the screen. “There’s an emergency latch to get the doors open, you know.” She pinned her eyes on Roz. “You were overwhelmed.”

Roz stammered. “Everyone was just standing around. The rain was so fast. I—”

“Excuses make you sound weak. Own your mistakes. That’s an important lesson. You fucked up.” She squeezed the arms of the chair, a signal that she was done. “Next time, call me when you’re in over your heads. This won’t happen again. Understood?” They both nodded. “Now I need the office. Excuse me.”

Roz and Kevin filed into the Health and Beauty aisle. The only staffer around was Milad, who oversaw the vitamins and shampoos and toothbrushes, and who was a grown-up, almost as old as Eleanor. He ignored them, taking fish oil inventory with a pencil and clipboard.

Kevin adjusted bottles of body wash that were already faced forward. Roz touched bars of soap, pretending to count them, unable to think. Had they doctored the audio to make her voice sound worse? She had been overwhelmed. No one was perfect all the time.

“We have to address this with staff,” Kevin said, frowning at the conditioner.
“The damage is already done. Just let it die down. Kicking the hornets’ nest won’t help.” It had worked after the produce manager quit, and that holiday season they tried to enforce mandatory overtime, and whenever some new staffer discovered the living wage calculator. You had to let them air their grievances, consider their options—stay or go—and keep running the business.

Hala came around the corner with a basket of restocks. They dispersed. Roz took a lap, gathering up baskets at the checkouts and checking paper bag levels before locking herself in the employee bathroom. The small room was a shrine to staff idleness, plastered with marker graffiti and wrinkled ads from old circulars augmented to advertise lewd melons and orgasming cucumbers, layered with photos of red-eyed staffers surprised by cameras in the aisles, people so distant Roz couldn’t name them, cartoons of customers, fliers for shows that happened years ago. It was like a forgotten bulletin board in a college dorm. Evidence of wasted time.

She opened a browser. She had earned a fucking break.

The most embarrassing thing was when she typed the letter K to search for something totally unrelated and Kelli’s feeds dropped down in her browser history. Roz had never met Audrey’s girlfriend—now fiancée. Sometimes Roz panicked, imagining that there was a secret way for Audrey to know how often she looked at their profiles, and she was sick with fear and herself.
Kelli’s feed was where the real information was. The pictures of the inside of their house, which used to be Roz’s house. Flowers on the kitchen table. The expensive rug in the living room. Audrey posted brand-building photos of clouds, weather maps, the newsroom. Kelli shared the light on the backyard grass at the end of the day. Audrey sitting across from her at a table or a selfie with their two faces squished together, which was the worst one to see but was also magnetic, the opportunity to see them in action, to try to understand the thing that made them a happy couple that wasn’t there for Audrey and Roz. Kelli was more feminine, flaunting long blond hair and lipstick, and Roz sometimes wondered if that was it, if Audrey wanted someone to share pink bras with.

Sometimes, too often, Roz scrolled deep through Audrey’s photos—it was like a little wayback machine of her own life—and looked at their own wedding. A live band. A mashed potato bar. Brisket from Salt Lick. Roz in a tux. Her mother on the phone with Audrey planning late into the night, inviting another seventy people on top of their already long guest list. Making sure their entire suburb, the whole county, knew her daughter was getting married to a woman and that she was fine with it. Making sure Roz knew she was forgiven for dropping out of college, now that she had found some version of an acceptable life, which was any life her mother could brag about.

Roz was staring at a picture of the two of them flanked by her parents when the text dropped. Her thumbs froze. Had she accidentally liked something? Watched a video and the app notified Audrey? Could it track her eyeballs? Her intentions?

Hey! Long time, no text.

Their last real talk was three years ago, when Audrey bought out Roz’s half of the house, replacing the chunk of inheritance Roz had spent on it. Inheritance money from her grandmother that she was still, technically, living off. After the house, she and Audrey sent birthday and holiday greetings for a year. And then: nothing.

Three dots appeared. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She wouldn’t answer. She would delete, finally, their entire text history.

Thought about you guys yesterday when I was in town. My camera guy said his wife tried to shop but you were packed. We should catch up. I have some news. Lunch this week?

Roz was embarrassed to find herself flushed and a little weepy. Maybe there was still some tenderness between them, some small but hearty tendril of love that Audrey wanted to honor by giving Roz the news of her nuptials in person. Maybe there was something about them that still mattered. And something that could be made new. The four of them, Molly and Roz and Audrey and Kelli, out to dinner once a month. Sharing holidays. Becoming an evolved kind of family. Maybe Kelli and Molly would become close—too close. Roz pictured herself comforting Audrey, holding her while she cried bittersweet tears that Roz, ironically, would understand all too well, would kiss away—

How’s tomorrow? Roz replied.

Perfect!

Someone banged on the door. “Just a minute!” Roz flushed and splashed cold water on her red cheeks. What in god’s name would she wear?

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From Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach. Reprinted by permission of University of Iowa Press. © 2026 by Jules Wernersbach. All rights reserved.

Work to Do can be ordered here.