Read Olive Oil and White Bread for Free Online

piece of paper. Look at it!”
    â€œWhat if it tells me to fuck off?”
    â€œThen it does. So what? Stop being such a wimp.”
    â€œOkay.” Deep breath in, slow breath out, she unfolded the paper:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Jillian Clark
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  716-555-0217
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Call me .

Four
    Angie was not naïve; she knew sales was a tough trade. But it took a week and a half before she closed her very first order. It was more difficult than she’d anticipated.
    Today, though. Today was a good day. She’d closed a sale. Her very first one. The order wasn’t large, but it was hers. She’d cold-called the company, gotten transferred to the right person, given her pitch. Hope kept telling her timing was everything, and such was the case with Jones Tree. She’d spoken to owner Matt Jones himself. Turned out, his company was fairly new in the landscape business, and he needed to outfit his team. He asked her to bring him some samples of T-shirts. She obliged.
    One of the things she’d really envied the salespeople when she’d first started working at Logo Promo was their freedom. They came and went as they pleased, visiting clients and suppliers. Nobody punched a clock. For the most part, they were autonomous. On bright and sunny days, the idea of hopping in her car and zipping along to a client meeting seemed appealing.
    Today, she got to experience that for herself as she headed out on her very first sales call.
    Matt Jones was a terrific first customer, because he was as new to all of it as Angie was. They laughed as they each stumbled over details. He had a bare bones logo design that needed help. She’d forgotten to bring color options for the shirts. In the end, he’d placed an order for fifteen T-shirts for his five-man crew and one full-zip sweatshirt for himself. They shook on it, he gave Angie a deposit, and she headed back to the office to tell Hope the good news, smiling all the way.
    Now, in her apartment, she popped open a beer to celebrate while the mouthwatering scent of garlic and basil from the pizza in the oven filled the miniscule galley kitchen. It was silly to be so giddy. She knew that. The order was tiny by most standards. Her commission would total out at maybe twenty bucks when all was said and done. She didn’t care. It was still a successful day. It was still a step forward. It was still a taste of what was possible for her. What if she sold fifty T-shirts to somebody? A hundred? More? Hope wrote up an order for a thousand pens the other day and netted herself a couple hundred dollars in commission. From one order! That was the beauty of the ad specialties business. The possibilities were endless. The money was there. You just had to work hard to get to it.
    Angie was nothing if not a hard worker.
    Using an oven mitt, she took the pizza—her father’s homemade—out of the oven to see if it was heated through yet. He and her mother had been so proud of her, she felt like a kid again bringing home an “A” on a test. They hugged her and kissed her and told her to keep up the good work. She smiled as she remembered their faces, her mother telling her the sky was the limit for her. As she plopped onto her couch with a plate of pizza and turned on the television, she thought, Yeah, the sky may be the limit, but I need to get a bit higher—and fast. Twenty-dollar commissions aren’t going to pay my rent. Unless I get a few dozen of them a week .
    â€œThen I’ll get a few dozen of them a week,” she said aloud, with determination, refusing to let reality creep in on her good mood. Instead, she savored the pizza, tried hard to solve the puzzle on “Wheel of Fortune” (failed), and finished the beer. As she set the empty can on the table next to the couch, her gaze fell on the piece of paper that had been sitting there for several