True Confections Read Free Page B

disgusting half-smoked cigar all day long instead) while barraging me with questions about my education, about my experience, about my family, about where I lived and what I wanted to do with my life.
    He didn’t seem to hear my hesitant, evasive, contradictory answers at all as he rooted through untidy heaps of papers and threw out more questions, one on top of the next—Why did I think I deserved to work here, did I know it was like joining a family, am I someone who gets sick a lot, am I reliable, where do I live, am I good with my hands, am I in college, why not, do I want to marry and have children, am I a team player, do I like licorice? Red and black, or did I prefer red and hate black? Which do I like better, Little Sammies or Tigermelts? Until finally he interrupted me to exclaim in triumph, Found the sucker! as he extracted a ledger book from beneath a pile of folders.
    I stopped trying to cook up plausible and attractive answers to each question, in order, since I was about three questions behind and I seemed to be talking to myself anyway, so finally I just stopped speaking altogether and waited to see what would come next. Was he listening at all to my replies? Was this a conversation, or a job interview, or what was it? I was now late for my shift at Helen’s Double Dip. Freddie would be seriously disturbed that I was not there to start the morning flavor batches of the day and complete the daily inventory checklist before the lines started to form. Was I reliable?
    Sam sat back in his creaking desk chair, holding the formerly misplaced ledger book in his lap, and then he looked me in the face for the first time, for a long moment. There was a metal bowl of deformed, uncoated Little Sammies on his desk, some of them undersized and missing parts, some of them all stucktogether in a blob of limbs and torsos. He ate a clump absent-mindedly while looking at me, and then he held out the bowl and I took a three-headed triplet cluster and nibbled on their heads while waiting for whatever came next. At last he said, with a wry smile, all at once, not pausing for my replies, the cigar still firmly planted in the corner of his mouth, You want to work here, kid? You’re what, sixteen? Eighteen? You want a job at Zip’s? You want to work? You a hard worker? Sister, this isn’t just a summer job. It’s hard work. You like candy, kiddo? What we make here are three great candy lines, true confections, that’s what my father, Eli—he founded the company—that’s what he called them, true confections. You like Little Sammies? That’s me, you’re looking at him, I’m the original Little Sammy. I used to be little, now I’m not so little. So what do you think? You know what? You’re hired. I got a good feeling.
    M Y FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW gave no indication of having any kind of good feeling about me whatsoever. Pearl Anastasio, Sam’s secretary, a Zip’s stalwart who had started at Zip’s as a Little Sammies summer wrapper when she was in high school and Eli ran the place (in the era before he rigged up the first wrapping machine on the Little Sammies line), someone who would turn out to be a true friend to me as the years passed, though I hardly made eye contact with her that day, led me down a corridor. We reached a windowless office, where Frieda Ziplinsky sat at a desk piled high with stacks of envelopes she was stuffing with what looked like order forms. She would stuff a dozen, then seal a dozen. Stuff, seal, stuff, seal. Her hands were a blur. We stood in the doorway waiting for her to stop and look up, but she didn’t stop and she didn’t look up. She was a stuffing and sealing pro, a stuffing and sealing maniac. FinallyPearl announced loudly, Hey, Mrs. Z. Mr. Z said to say to you we’ve got our new hire. Okay, Mrs. Z.? Frieda finally glanced up and gave me a sour look. Pearl abandoned me with a friendly pat on the shoulder that was combined with a little push so I would step into that room.
    You’re