Finally, miraculously, the summer when Annajane was fifteen, Ruth announced that they would not be going to the mountains. Her sister and brother-in-law had sold the cabin and were moving to Florida and taking Annajane’s grandma with them.

Annajane was on the phone with Pokey moments later. “Guess what?” she said breathlessly. “No more stinkin’ mountains for me! I’ve got the whole summer to do whatever I want!”

“Guess what else?” Pokey countered. “Daddy says he’ll give us jobs at the plant this summer, if we want. Real jobs! With name badges and paychecks and everything.”

“No way!” Annajane squealed with delight. “Our own money. No more babysitting for me.”

The Monday after school was out found Annajane reporting to the Quixie front office, where Voncile, Glenn Bayless’s assistant, seemed surprised to see her.

“Mr. Bayless has a job for me,” Annajane said quietly. “Pokey said so.”

“Of course,” Voncile had said, smiling and leafing through some papers on her desktop. Growing up, Annajane and Pokey had always had the run of the Quixie plant. Voncile looked up at Annajane, standing there in the neatly pressed plaid dress Ruth had sewn just for this occasion. “Where is Miss Pokey this morning?”

“Oh. I thought she’d be here already,” Annajane said, her spirits sinking. Pokey had promised to meet her at the plant at nine sharp.

“Well. Do you know how to type?”

“Yes ma’am,” Annajane said proudly. “Forty-five words a minute.”

“Wonderful,” Voncile said. She ushered Annajane into a tiny windowless office not far from the reception room. A long table and two folding metal chairs were in the center of the room, and an enormous canvas mail bin sat beside the table, where a computer had been set up. A large plastic tub held boxes of business-sized white envelopes, and a smaller one held glossy Quixie coupons.

“Here we go,” Voncile said. She gestured at the mail bin. “Are you familiar with our Quixie Quickie summer promotion?”

“I don’t think so,” Annajane replied, trying not to giggle.

Voncile picked up a bulky padded envelope and ripped it open. Five distinctive red and green Quixie screwtop bottle caps tumbled out. Voncile swept them into the trash with one hand, and extracted a piece of paper from the envelope.

“This,” she said, waving the slip of paper, “is what we’re after. We’ve asked Quixie lovers to mail in five bottle caps, along with their name and mailing address, for a chance to win one of those.” She gestured to a row of gleaming red Coleman coolers against the far wall. Each of the coolers was printed with the oval Quixie logo, the one with the Quixie Pixie, leaning against a Quixie bottle, smiling and winking impishly.

Annajane counted two dozen coolers.

“So,” Voncile said briskly, handing the slip to Annajane. “You’ll type the name and address into our database. Right?” She leaned over the computer, tapped a few keys, and brought up a blank spreadsheet. “Just type on each line, and hit tab when you come to the end of the address. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Yes ma’am,” Annajane said.

“Then,” Voncile said, “Come to my office and let me know when you’ve typed in all these addresses. I’ll print them out onto labels, and then you’ll put the labels on those envelopes.” She plucked an envelope from a box and showed it to Annajane. The Quixie logo was printed in the upper-left-hand corner of each one. “You’ll put one coupon for a free twelve-ounce bottle of Quixie in each envelope, seal up the envelope, and put it in that other bin. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” was all Annajane could think of to say.

“Good,” Voncile said, glancing at her watch. “I’ve got a meeting right now, but you just sit right down here and get started, and I’ll come back afterwards to see how you’re doing. All right?”

“Yes ma’am,” Annajane said. She sat down at the computer, flexed her fingertips, and got started. It was slow going at first, ripping open the envelopes, sorting out the addresses, and then counting out the bottle caps. She was shocked to discover some envelopes didn’t actually contain five bottle caps. Others might contain three or four Quixie caps, but with a non-Quixie cap thrown in to fill out the mix. Annajane counted Coke caps, Pepsi caps, Dr Pepper caps, even a few Hires and Barq root beer bottle caps. These she indignantly threw in the trash, along with the sender’s entry blank. Who did these people think they were fooling?

After an hour or so, she got a system going, opening twenty-five envelopes at a time, scanning the caps, and then typing the names into the computer. Every once in a while, she’d get up, walk around the room, and peek out the door, wondering what was taking Pokey so long. Hadn’t they agreed they would start their careers today?

At noon, her stomach started to growl. Her shoulders ached, and she was getting a headache from staring at the flickering computer screen. She wished she’d thought to bring along a lunch. At one, she walked over to Voncile’s office, to inquire about taking a break. But the office was empty, and Mr. Bayless’s office door was closed, too.

Finally, she remembered the break room, where she and Pokey had played restaurant as little girls, serving paper cups of Quixie from the fountain machine to the plant workers and being treated to packages of Tom’s salted peanuts or Cheetos from the vending machines.

She was back at her computer, sipping from a cup of Quixie and nibbling a Mr. Goodbar when the door flew open.

“Come on, you little brat,” a man’s deep voice called. “Mama sent me to take you to lunch.” He stepped into the room, and Annajane was so flustered by an in-the-flesh glimpse of Mason Bayless that she knocked over her drink.

Speechless, she watched a bright red river of soda splashing onto the stack of contest entry blanks she’d just stacked beside the computer.

“Oh no,” she cried, jumping up. She reached into the trash bin and grabbed a discarded envelope and started madly dabbing at the mess. But it was too late. She’d greedily poured herself a huge cup of Quixie, and now everything on the tabletop was soaked.

“Damn,” she wailed, mopping and breathing hard, and trying not to look up at her best friend’s big brother. When she realized that she’d cursed out loud, she blushed harder and mopped faster.

Mason Bayless was sunburned, which made his blue eyes look bluer, and his dark blond hair needed cutting because it brushed down his high forehead and across his thick dark eyebrows. His prominent nose had a bump across the bridge, but he had perfect white teeth, except for one chipped incisor. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and well-worn high-top leather work boots and a green Quixie Beverage Company uniform shirt with red pinstripes and an embroidered patch over his breast that said MASON.

Not that he needed a name patch. Not much. Every one of the three hundred employees at Quixie Beverage Company knew Mr. Glenn Bayless’s oldest boy, as did just about everybody in the community. Passcoe was a company town, and Quixie and Passcoe had been inextricably linked for more than seventy years.

Mason’s uniform shirt was untucked and the top three buttons unfastened. After a moment, he grabbed another envelope and began sweeping the ruined papers into the trash.

“Sorry,” he drawled. “Didn’t mean to scare you like that. I was looking for my sister.”

“Oh, wait,” Annajane said, grabbing for the trash can. “I can’t, I mean, those are contest entries. And I’ve got to type them into the computer. Maybe I can get them dried out…”

“Forget it,” Mason said. “Those are toast.”

“But I’m supposed to type them all in. It’s a contest, and the winner gets a cooler, and it’s not fair…” she sighed. “I’ll have to tell Voncile, I guess. I don’t know what she’ll say.”

“Voncile won’t give a rat’s ass,” Mason said. He smiled. “I’ll just tell her I did it. Which is kinda true. It was my fault.”