Chapter 2 - Getting Somebody to Friday
When we reached the café, Mrs. Okafor was unlocking the front door. She'd owned the place for almost twenty years and had hired Harper back in June. She glanced at Harper, then at me, and her easy morning smile disappeared instantly.
"You told her?" she asked Harper.
Harper nodded.
I stopped walking. "You knew about this?"
Mrs. Okafor slowly pushed the door open. "Come inside, Diane."
That did absolutely nothing to calm me down.
The café wasn't open yet. Chairs still sat upside down on the tables, and the pastry case was empty. Mrs. Okafor led us behind the counter into the cramped little office where Harper usually counted her tips at the end of a shift. She opened a metal filing cabinet.
"Before you get angry with me," she said, "I didn't fully realize how far she'd taken this until fairly recently."
"That sentence is not helping your case."
"I know it isn't."
She reached behind a box of receipt paper and pulled out something completely unremarkable-looking — an old index card, corners soft and bent, one edge stained with a ring of dried coffee. Written across the front, in blue and black ink, were sixteen first names, each paired with a date. Next to several of them was a single word.
FRIDAY.
I recognized the handwriting before my brain fully caught up to what I was looking at.
Daniel's handwriting.
I took the card from her hands. "No."
She didn't say anything.
I turned to Harper. "Where did you find this?"
"Back in July."
"What is it?"
Mrs. Okafor pulled out a chair. "Sit down."
I stayed standing.
She sighed. "Your husband used to come in here a lot."
"I know that."
Daniel had loved diner coffee more than any reasonable adult should. He swore it tasted better out of thick white ceramic mugs. I always told him that was ridiculous. He always told me I had no culture. But I had genuinely never known Mrs. Okafor thought of him as anything more than a regular customer.
"Do you remember George?" she asked.
"No."
"The first name on the card." She tapped it. GEORGE.
Mrs. Okafor leaned back against the desk. "About seven years ago, Daniel came in early one morning and noticed a man washing his face in the restroom sink."
"Why would he be doing that?"
"Because George had spent the night sleeping in his car."
Harper stayed quiet, listening.
"He had a job interview that morning," Mrs. Okafor went on. "Daniel watched him trying to smooth out a shirt that looked like it had been slept in — because it had. He asked George if he had an interview. George said, 'I'm fine.'"
I could practically hear Daniel's voice before she even said what came next.
"Daniel looked straight at that wrinkled shirt and said, 'Didn't ask that.'"
I closed my eyes. That was Daniel exactly. If he asked whether your ankle hurt and you said "I'm okay," it drove him up the wall. He wanted the answer to the actual question he'd asked.
"So what happened?"
"He bought George breakfast. Took him to a discount store for a clean shirt. Gave him bus fare on top of it."
She tapped the date next to George's name. "He got the job."
I exhaled slowly. "So that's what this card is."
"Not quite." She crossed her arms. "George nearly lost that job three days later."
"Why?"
"His first paycheck wasn't coming until Friday. He didn't have bus fare to keep getting to work in the meantime."
Daniel found out. He didn't pay George's rent. He didn't swoop in and fix every problem in the man's life. He just covered the gap. Bus fare. A little laundry money. A few lunches. Just enough to keep George working until that first paycheck actually landed.
Mrs. Okafor said Daniel started noticing gaps like that everywhere, once he started looking. A woman got hired at a restaurant kitchen but couldn't afford the required nonslip shoes before her first shift. A young father landed a warehouse job but needed a few days of childcare before his first check came through. Someone else just needed twenty dollars of phone service so an employer could actually reach him.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing life-altering on its own. Just small, stupid barriers standing between people and jobs they'd already earned.
Harper looked at Mrs. Okafor. "What did Dad call it?"
Her expression told me she already knew the answer.
Mrs. Okafor smiled. "Getting somebody to Friday."
That was the moment I finally sat down. Not because I'd suddenly forgotten Harper's four thousand dollars was gone. But because I'd been married to Daniel for fourteen years. I knew exactly how he took his coffee. I knew he couldn't fall asleep wearing socks. I knew he butchered the lyrics to nearly every song and refused to admit it, ever, under any circumstances. I knew the exact face he made when he was worried about something.
But I had never once heard about this.
"Sixteen people?" I asked.
Mrs. Okafor nodded. "That's just how many I personally knew about."
"Why keep a list at all?"
She laughed. "Because your husband was ridiculous, that's why. Every couple of months he'd walk in and ask, 'How many Fridays are we at?' Apparently just quietly helping people wasn't enough for him. He needed a scoreboard."
Harper almost smiled at that.
"He wasn't competing with anyone," Mrs. Okafor added.
"No," I whispered. "He would've been competing with himself."
"Exactly."
I looked down at the card again. Sixteen names. Then I noticed something on the back — different handwriting, newer ink, numbers running one through seventeen.
I looked up at Harper. She'd gone very still.
"You wrote this?"
"Yeah."
"Seventeen people?"
She nodded. "This summer."
I looked at Daniel's sixteen names on the front of the card. Then at Harper's seventeen numbers on the back.
She hadn't added herself to her father's list.
She'd started her own.
Harper glanced toward Mrs. Okafor, who nodded toward the front door.
"She's at work right now," Mrs. Okafor said.
I stood up. "Who?"
Harper shoved both hands into her hoodie pockets. "Mom, before we go — there's one more thing."
I waited.
"The seventeen names aren't the whole story."
"What does that mean?"
May you like
Her eyes filled again. "It means I found seventeen Fridays of my own to get people to."
Mrs. Okafor grabbed her keys off the counter. "Come with me."
