First Job Helps First Novel (Sydney Salter)

The same week that my mom took away my car--for some teenage antics--I got a job at a local cake and flower shop delivering cakes, pies, and flowers in a big old van with no back windows and a cracked side mirror. Someone should've maybe asked a question or two when the new delivery driver showed up to work on a bicycle.

The first delivery went okay. I drove several pies to a diner in one of the little casinos on the edge of Reno's downtown casino district. I delivered flowers to another casino's wedding chapel. So far so good.

The next delivery. Not so good. I loaded the van okay. But when I backed out, I drove the sliding door into a short metal post on the edge of the driveway behind the shop. The sliding door no longer functioned.

And there was a big wedding that afternoon. 

The huge tiered cake had to be loaded into the van by passing each layer through the front passenger seat onto the racks in the back of the van. The cake made it into the van, but my boss was not happy to be pulling up to a wedding in a damaged van. 

The wedding was being held in a beautiful backyard garden. The cake had its own little white table. My boss had set the large bottom layer in the center of the table and stuck the white columns into the cake, along with another layer. She went to fetch the elaborately decorated top layer. Seeing another layer of the cake sitting in its box, and feeling awful about the van, and wanting to be helpful, I set the next layer onto the columns, and ran off to help my boss. 

We returned to find that layer of cake in the grass. Absolutely ruined. 

My boss didn't speak to me on the way back to the cake shop, and I can't remember the rest of the afternoon aside from sitting across from my boss who said she had to let me go, saying something like I'd cost her too much. I do remember biking home uphill, crying the whole way. 

I held my first job for a single day, but they still remembered me when I returned to give them a copy of my first novel, many decades later, in which I stretched that day into several weeks of work to make it more believable.