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October 1981
"McCord, get your ass in here, now!" the booming voice of James McGuire echoed from the rear storage room, reaching out to the public areas of the Shamrock Bar & Grill.
The dark haired twenty-year-old wiping down the top of the bar froze at the sound, his head automatically tilting in the direction the summons had come from. Few things put fear into the heart of Danny McCord, but near the top of the shortlist was the sixty-five-year-old owner of the Shamrock when he was in a bad mood.
Dropping the small towel that he'd been using into the cleaning bucket under the bar, Danny quickly made his way down the length of the countertop, then through the kitchen and finally into the storage room beyond. There he saw the object of his concern standing over a stack of open cardboard boxes, the expression on his face not a happy one.
"Is something wrong, Mr. McGuire?" Danny asked as he glanced into one of the open boxes but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"You might say that," the grizzled older man said. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but did I, or did I not, ask you to call in the supply order to Ferguson's on Monday?"
"Yes sir, Mr. McGuire, and I did as you asked," Danny replied, a touch of caution in his tone.
"Okay, so now that we've established that," the balding senior noted, "can you explain, in the name of all that's holy, why you ordered five thousand sets of plastic kitchen utensils?"
"Because that was what you wrote on the order pad," Danny replied.
"No, I ordered five hundred," the owner said, "more than enough for a month. Why would I order ten times that?"
"I hate to contradict you, Mr. McGuire," but it did say five thousand," Danny insisted. "I did think that it was a lot, but when the man from Ferguson's said that entitled you to a bulk discount, I figured you just wanted to save a little money by ordering more."
Glancing down at the invoice, James saw that the price per unit was indeed less than he normally paid. Still, it irked him that his instructions hadn't been followed.
"If you thought the order was excessive, why didn't you confirm it with me?" he asked, unable to simply let it go.
"Because the last time I did, you said that you weren't paying me to think, and if I couldn't follow simple instructions, you'd fire me and find someone who could," Danny offered.
James had indeed said that, but it wasn't in his nature to admit error. The smart thing for Danny to have done would've been to simply say he'd made a mistake and that would've been that. But taking the blame for something he didn't do wasn't in his nature either.
Yet, at the same time, he was questioning if he could've made a mistake. Thinking back to Monday afternoon, he remembered that while he'd been waiting on hold for Ferguson's order clerk, he'd struck up a conversation with Tara O'Halloran, one of the night waitresses, who had stopped by to pick up her check, having been off the previous Friday.
Danny had been trying to get Tara to go out with him since he'd first started working at the Shamrock, three months ago. But she had consistently turned him down, Monday having been no exception. Even so, Tara had been dressed in such a tight outfit that afternoon that he hadn't been able to take his eyes off of her -- not even when the order rep finally came back on the line.
'Could I have read it wrong?' he asked himself, then brushed away the thought because, if he'd hadn't seen the number, he wouldn't have thought it excessive.
"Do you still have the sheet from the order pad?" James asked him, making it clear that he wasn't going to let the matter drop.
"No, I put it on Mrs. McGuire's desk when I was done," Danny answered, adding that was what he was supposed to do with it.
Katherine Rose McGuire, known more commonly as simply Rose, was James McGuire's sister-in-law. The widow of his younger brother, Keith. He'd given her a job doing the bar's books when Keith had died ten years before. He'd initially done so out of a sense of family obligation, but soon learned that despite what else he might have thought of her, she turned out to be one hell of a bookkeeper. She'd straightened out his finances and helped make what had been a barely successful business into one that increased its profits by a third in only a few years.
"Well then, since Rose saves every scrap of paper anyone gives her, I've no doubt that she still has that as well," James said. "So, why don't we just go and take a look at it? And I promise you this, Danny Boy, if it doesn't say five thousand, you'll be looking for a new job come the morrow."
'Fuck!' Danny thought, no longer as sure as he'd been a few minutes before of what he'd read. 'I can't afford to lose this job.'
The Shamrock wasn't the only restaurant in the area that Rose did the books for, as she had built up a nice little business for herself since turning the bar around. As it happened, she wasn't in the small office when James dragged Danny into it. Checking her calendar on the wall, he saw that she would be in today after three o'clock.
James considered going through her files to find the supply order himself, but then remembered the last time he'd ventured into her domain and the verbal trashing she'd given him. So he turned to Danny and said that he'd gotten a three-hour reprieve.
"Now get your ass back to work," he added in a voice no less thunderous than he'd used to call Danny from two rooms away.
-=-=-=-
Three hours and ten minutes later, Rose McGuire walked through the front door of the Shamrock, causing more than one patron to turn in her direction. Five six and a hundred and thirty pounds, with short red hair cut an inch above her shoulders, the sixty-three-year-old projected an aura of confidence that women half her age envied. Most men, however, found it intimidating, which was one of the reasons she hadn't remarried, despite having retained much of her looks.
James McGuire could never understand what his brother saw in Rose in the first place. She'd been a forty-year-old widow when they first met, her first husband having been killed in the Pacific during the war and was four years older than Keith. The younger McGuire had never been great with the ladies, James acknowledged, but he still thought he could've done better. That he'd still been unmarried at thirty-six, however, might have said different.
James gave her a few minutes to settle in at her desk, then once more corralled Danny and hauled him into the office. He quickly explained the situation, including the fact that Danny's job was riding on what the original order form said.
"You can't be serious," Rose said as he finished. "You're actually going to fire him if he read your scribbly handwriting wrong?"
"There's nothing wrong with my handwriting," James countered. "The kid cost me money; I don't take that lightly."
"Money that you'll make up over the next few months since you won't have to order utensils," Rose pointed out. "In fact, since you got the order at a discount, you might look at it as Danny saving you some money. Buying in bulk is more cost effective, as I've tried to tell you many times."
"I like things ordered the way I've always ordered them," James insisted. "And right now, I care about the bottom line this month, not the next two."
Rose slowly shook her head, as she couldn't believe that James was being so thick headed. Then, another idea popped into her head.
"Well, you could always offer part of the order to Balducci's and Callahan's," Rose suggested, referencing two of the other restaurants in the area that she did work for. "I know neither has put in their monthly supply orders yet."
