Her boss meant to send the email to someone else, and it landed in her inbox instead
The subject line read: RE: Reference request – Nancy Hettinger.
Nancy almost deleted it, thinking it was spam. Then she saw who it was from.
Mike Ostendorf. Her boss.
She was fifty-seven and had run the dispatch office at Ostendorf Heating & Cooling in Quincy, Illinois, for nineteen years. She knew every furnace in the county. She knew which customers had oxygen tanks, which ones couldn’t afford a service call in January, and which technician to send to the widow on Maine Street who got scared of strangers.
Mike was forty-eight, the founder’s son. He’d taken over the business five years ago.
This summer, Nancy had started applying for other jobs. The Quincy school district needed a transportation coordinator. It paid fourteen thousand dollars more, with a pension. Her husband’s disability check didn’t stretch like it used to.
She’d interviewed well. Then a polite rejection.
Two more jobs. Two more rejections.
Now she opened the email.
It was Mike’s reply to the school district’s HR office. He must have hit the wrong name in the address bar. Her name sat right next to theirs.
Between us, he’d written, Nancy has had attendance issues and struggles under pressure. I’d be cautious. Frankly, we’d hate to lose her, but I wouldn’t hire her for a leadership role.
Nancy read it twice. Her face went hot. In nineteen years, she’d missed six days of work. Four of them were for her mother’s funeral.
She looked up at the dispatch board on the wall, covered in colored magnets. The coffee mug the technicians had given her said World’s Best Dispatcher.
She could quit today. She could confront Mike in front of everyone.
Instead, she printed the email and walked down the hall.
It was Monday. That meant Arnie Ostendorf, seventy-nine, the founder, was sitting in his old corner office with a box of donuts and the newspaper.
Nancy set the printout on his desk.
“Mr. Ostendorf,” she said quietly, “I think you need to read what your son has been telling people about me.”
Arnie Read It Twice
Arnie wore the same brown cardigan he wore every Monday, even in July, when the office air conditioner rattled like a bucket of bolts.
He picked up the paper.
His reading glasses were on a cord around his neck. He pushed them onto his nose, then moved the page closer to the window.
Nancy watched his eyes move down the email.
At the line about attendance, his right thumb stopped rubbing the edge of the paper.
“Where did you get this?”
“He sent it to me.”
“He sent it to you?”
“By mistake, I suppose.”
Arnie looked at the computer printout again. The page had a small blue line across the top where the email program had printed the sender and recipient.
TO: Marcy Bell, Quincy Public Schools
CC: Nancy Hettinger
Nancy hadn’t noticed the CC line until then.
Arnie did.
“He copied you on it,” he said.
“He must not have meant to.”
“Mike knows how to use email.”
The office door was open. Somewhere down the hall, a compressor kicked on. The old building shook a little, and a stack of Arnie’s newspapers slid off the filing cabinet.
Nancy stayed standing.
Arnie lowered the paper.
“You missed six days?”
“Six in nineteen years.”
“Four for your mother.”
“Two for pneumonia. One of those days, Mike’s father came to my house with soup because he said the office couldn’t function without me.”
Arnie’s mouth moved, but no sound came out at first.
Then he said, “He told you that?”
“He told everybody that.”
Arnie folded the printout down the middle. Not neatly. He pressed it with the side of his hand until the crease held.
“Sit down, Nancy.”
She sat in the wooden chair across from him. The seat had a split in the vinyl that caught on pantyhose. She had snagged the same pair of stockings there in 2009 and never told him.
Arnie opened a drawer and took out a yellow legal pad.
“Who else did you apply to?”
She gave him the names.
He wrote each one down, slowly. The school district. A medical supply company in Hannibal. A regional electric cooperative outside town.
“Did they ask for Mike?”
“They asked for my current supervisor.”
“And you gave them Mike?”
“Yes.”
Arnie stared at the names.
“What did he say to the other two?”
“I don’t know.”
“No,” Arnie said. “I suppose you don’t.”
For a minute, neither of them spoke. A delivery truck backed up outside, beeping in reverse. Arnie reached for a donut and then left his hand hovering above the box.
“Did you write anything to the school?”
“No.”
“Did you call Marcy Bell?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Nancy looked at him.
“Good?”
“Don’t give him a chance to delete this.”
She hadn’t thought of that.
Arnie took the printout and placed it inside a manila folder. On the tab, in black marker, someone had written PAYROLL 2018.
“You have a copy?” he asked.
“In my printer tray.”
“Get it. The original stays here.”
“It was sent to my email.”
“Then print the email header, too.”
There was the old Arnie, the one who had taught her to keep carbon copies of repair authorizations and to write down the name of anyone who said, “Just trust me.”
Nancy stood.
At the door, she turned back.
“Why would he do this?”
Arnie looked toward the window. From there he could see the company sign, the one with the faded red furnace on it. His father had painted it himself in 1968.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
That answer followed her back to the dispatch office.
The Names on the Rejections
Nancy pulled the other emails from her personal account.
The first rejection came from Midwestern Medical Supply on June 21. They thanked her for her time and said they had decided to move forward with another candidate.
The second came from the electric cooperative on July 8.
Same language. Different signature.
Neither message mentioned references.
She had assumed the interviews had gone badly because that was easier than imagining a person she knew had been working against her.
At noon, her coworker Cheryl Pruitt came in carrying two service tickets and a paper plate of birthday cake.
Cheryl was thirty-two, had three sons, and kept orange candy in every desk drawer.
“You look like you want to stab the copier,” Cheryl said.
“The copier deserves it.”
“Mike in there?”
Nancy looked toward the glass wall of the main office. Mike’s truck wasn’t outside.
“No.”
Cheryl set down the tickets.
“What happened?”
Nancy nearly told her. The words reached her teeth and stopped.
If she said them aloud, the office would change. Every conversation near the coffee machine would have a second meaning. Every time Mike said good morning, people would watch her face.
She took the printed email from her desk drawer and handed it over.
Cheryl read the first line. Then the second.
The birthday cake slipped sideways on its plate.
“He wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“He said you have attendance issues?”
“Yes.”
Cheryl looked at her.
“You came in the day your appendix burst.”
“I did not have my appendix out.”
“You had something.”
“Kidney stone.”
“You threw up in the trash can beside my chair.”
“That was the day after.”
Cheryl kept holding the page.
“Who was he sending it to?”
“The school district.”
“Oh.”
That was all Cheryl said. She sat down without asking.
For nineteen years, Nancy had been the person who knew what happened when the phones rang at 7:03 in the morning and all four crews were already out. She had found apartments for new technicians. She had called funeral homes when a customer died halfway through a furnace installation. She had kept a list of people who paid their bills late because their gas had been shut off.
Her work had never sounded important when she described it.
“I answer phones,” she usually said.
But the company had no written dispatch system. Nancy had built the whole thing on index cards, colored magnets, and memory. The software came later, in 2016, and she had trained everyone on it.
She knew which buttons not to press.
At 12:19, Mike came through the front door.
He wore a gray shirt with the company logo stitched over his chest. His hair was wet from the heat outside.
He looked at Nancy, then at Cheryl, then at the legal pad on Nancy’s desk.
“Everything all right?”
Cheryl folded the email once and placed it beneath the service tickets.
Nancy said, “You tell me.”
Mike stopped.
The office kept moving around them. Phones rang. A technician swore at the copier. Someone in the warehouse dropped a wrench.
Mike glanced at Cheryl.
“Can I talk to Nancy?”
Cheryl picked up her plate.
“I’m going to finish my cake in the bathroom.”
She left.
Mike pulled the door shut.
Nancy stayed seated.
“Did you mean to copy me on that email?”
His face changed by a fraction. His mouth opened, closed.
“What email?”
She took the page from beneath the tickets and put it on the desk.
Mike read it standing up.
By the time he reached the last sentence, the skin above his collar had turned red.
“Nancy, I can explain.”
“Go ahead.”
“The district called me. They wanted an honest reference.”
“You said I have attendance issues.”
“I meant you’ve had some health things.”
“You wrote attendance issues.”
“I was trying to give them context.”
“You wrote that you wouldn’t hire me for a leadership role.”
Mike sat down in Cheryl’s chair.
“That was about the position.”
“The transportation coordinator position?”
“Yes.”
“You said you wouldn’t hire me for a leadership role.”
“It’s a large district. They have six hundred buses.”
“Then why did you say you’d hate to lose me?”
Mike rubbed both hands over his face.
“Because we would.”
Nancy looked through the glass wall at the dispatch board.
“Would you?”
He didn’t answer.
What Mike Needed Her For
Mike had taken over from his father after a heart attack in 2019.
At first, he tried to be everywhere. He walked through the warehouse with a clipboard. He sat in on service calls. He changed the company’s invoices from white paper to pale gray because he said white looked cheap.
He also moved Nancy’s desk three feet from the front window because he said customers needed to see her.
Then the pandemic came, and half the office stopped coming in. Nancy kept showing up with a mask tied around her neck and a bottle of hand sanitizer in her purse.
She learned which technicians would work in nursing homes and which ones wouldn’t. She knew who had children home from school. She shifted the schedule without making a speech about it.
Mike told her she was a lifesaver.
He said it at the Christmas dinner in front of thirty-seven people.
Afterward, Nancy had gone home with a small gift bag from the company. Inside was a candle that smelled like cedar. Her husband, Ron, had asked if she liked it.
“It smells like a man’s closet,” she said.
They laughed.
That was before Ron’s stroke.
Now his left hand shook when he tried to button a shirt. He had been a machinist for thirty years, and his disability check covered the mortgage, barely. The school district’s pension had turned from a number on a brochure into groceries, prescription copays, and the new ramp outside their back door.
Nancy hadn’t told Mike about the money.
She had only told him she was looking.
“I thought you were happy here,” he said.
“I was.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to leave.”
“No. It means I’m allowed to look.”
Mike leaned forward.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“You sent a bad reference.”
“I sent an honest one.”
“Then show me the attendance record.”
He looked at her.
Nancy opened the payroll system on her computer. She clicked through the years, past vacation requests and holiday hours. The company had no formal attendance file, but every absence appeared on a time sheet.
She printed the report.
Eight pages.
Nancy highlighted the dates in yellow. Six total. The sheet showed the reason beside each one because Arnie had insisted on written records.
Mother’s funeral. Pneumonia. Kidney stone.
She put it in front of Mike.
He didn’t touch it.
“Those other companies probably rejected you for other reasons,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“The school district may have had somebody internal.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re making this into something it isn’t.”
Nancy looked at him for a long moment.
“Then why did you copy me?”
His chair creaked.
“I hit the wrong field.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer.”
He stood too fast and bumped his knee against the desk.
“You want me to call them and correct it?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“Today.”
Mike picked up the printout. The paper bent under his fingers.
“I’ll call them.”
“And the other two.”
He stared at her.
“You want me to call every place you applied?”
“I want you to tell them the truth.”
Something hard came into his face then. Not anger exactly. A calculation.
“Be careful, Nancy.”
She heard it.
The words were small. They landed anyway.
“Careful of what?”
Mike put the paper down.
“You don’t know what’s going on here.”
“Then tell me.”
He opened the door.
“Not in the middle of the office.”
He walked out.
Nancy watched him cross the room. At the dispatch board, he stopped beside the magnets and moved one from Tuesday to Wednesday.
He had never worked the board.
Arnie Had Kept One More File
Arnie called Mike into the corner office at 1:06.
Nancy knew because the old wall clock ran four minutes slow, and Arnie had shouted the time into the hall.
“Mike. Now.”
Mike went in.
The door closed.
For ten minutes, nothing happened.
At 1:17, Cheryl came over and pretended to look for staples. At 1:21, the warehouse manager walked past twice. At 1:29, a customer called about a furnace making a “metallic chicken sound,” and Nancy had to explain that no, the furnace did not have a chicken inside it.
At 1:43, Mike left the office.
He didn’t look at Nancy.
At 2:02, Arnie called her in.
There was a second folder on his desk.
This one was green.
Arnie opened it.
Inside were three printed emails from former employees. The first was from a technician named Dan Kowalski, who had quit in March. The second came from a bookkeeper named Janet Doyle. The third had no signature.
All three described the same thing.
Mike had asked them to train replacements before telling them their jobs were ending.
Nancy read the emails.
Dan wrote that Mike had called him unreliable after Dan requested two days off for his daughter’s surgery.
Janet wrote that Mike had told a new employer she was “not good with confidential material,” even though she had handled company payroll for eleven years.
The unsigned letter said, He keeps people afraid because he needs them to stay.
Nancy put the page down.
“Why do you have these?”
“People send things to the old owner.”
“You knew?”
“I knew Mike was making mistakes.”
“This isn’t a mistake.”
Arnie rubbed his forehead.
“No.”
The word sat there.
Nancy looked at the green folder.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Arnie had no quick answer. His eyes went to the donut box. There were two left, one with chocolate icing and one plain.
“Because he’s my son,” he said.
Nancy waited.
“And because I thought if I gave him enough time, he’d grow into the job.”
“He’s forty-eight.”
“I know how old he is.”
“He’s not a kid.”
“I know that, too.”
Arnie closed the folder.
“After your email came in, I checked the company account. Mike has sent negative references on eight people in the last three years.”
Nancy stared at him.
“Eight?”
“Some were verbal. Some weren’t documented.”
“Why tell me now?”
“Because I found something else.”
He opened a bottom drawer and took out a photocopy of a letter dated July 14.
It was from the Quincy school district.
Nancy read the first paragraph.
Dear Mr. Ostendorf,
Thank you for speaking with us about Nancy Hettinger. We were impressed by her interview and hope to contact her after the final candidate meeting.
The letter was signed by Marcy Bell.
There was another page.
Before we proceed, please confirm whether Ms. Hettinger is available to begin September 3.
Nancy’s fingers went cold around the paper.
“Where did this come from?”
“Mike left it in the copier.”
“When?”
“Friday.”
“He knew they were considering me.”
Arnie nodded.
“He knew before he wrote that reference.”
Nancy read the letter again.
At the bottom, Marcy had added a handwritten note: Please call Monday.
Monday was today.
The school district hadn’t rejected her.
They were waiting.
The Call He Didn’t Expect
Arnie picked up his phone.
“Call them,” Nancy said.
“I will.”
“No. Let me.”
He handed her the phone.
Nancy dialed the number on Marcy Bell’s letter. The line rang four times.
“Human Resources, Quincy Public Schools.”
“Hi, this is Nancy Hettinger. I’m calling about the transportation coordinator position.”
A pause.
“Ms. Hettinger, we were expecting to hear from you.”
Nancy looked at Arnie.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t receive your message.”
“We sent it to your current employer.”
“I didn’t get it.”
Another pause, shorter this time.
“Well, we’d like to talk again. There was some concern about your availability. Mr. Ostendorf told us you had a history of attendance problems and that you struggled in high-pressure situations.”
Nancy closed her eyes.
He had said the words out loud, too.
“I’m looking at my attendance records,” she said. “I’ve missed six days in nineteen years. Four were for my mother’s funeral. Two were for pneumonia and a kidney stone.”
Marcy didn’t speak.
Nancy continued.
“I also need to tell you that Mr. Ostendorf’s email was sent to me by mistake. I have a copy.”
“Can you forward it?”
“I can.”
“Please do.”
Nancy sent it while Marcy stayed on the phone. She attached the attendance report, too.
At 2:31, Marcy said, “I’m going to speak with our superintendent.”
“Thank you.”
“We’d still like to meet with you.”
“I’d like that.”
When the call ended, Nancy put the phone down.
Arnie reached for the email printout.
“Now call the other two,” he said.
Nancy did.
The medical supply company told her they had hired a cousin of one of the owners. The electric cooperative had chosen someone with experience in fleet maintenance.
Neither rejection had anything to do with Mike.
He had still made sure she would doubt herself.
At 3:15, Mike came back into the office.
Arnie was waiting near the dispatch board.
“Your father wants you,” Nancy said.
Mike looked at the phone in her hand.
“Did you call the school?”
“Yes.”
His face went blank.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you didn’t.”
He took one step toward her.
Arnie came out of the corner office.
“Mike.”
The word stopped him.
Arnie held up the green folder.
“I’ve spoken to our attorney.”
Mike looked from the folder to Nancy.
“You’re really doing this?”
Arnie’s voice had changed. It wasn’t loud.
“I’m asking you to resign as general manager.”
Mike gave a short laugh.
“You’re asking me to resign from my own company?”
“From your position. Not your ownership.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious.”
“You think she’s going to run this place?”
Arnie turned to Nancy.
“No,” he said. “I think she already has.”
Mike looked at the colored magnets.
His face broke then, but only for a second.
“You’re choosing her over me?”
Arnie took the brown cardigan off the back of his chair and folded it over one arm.
“I’m choosing the person who tells the truth when the furnace is on fire.”
Nobody said anything.
Mike left through the front door.
The bell over it gave one thin ring.
The Offer
The school district called Wednesday morning.
Nancy was in the dispatch office, eating toast over the keyboard because she had forgotten lunch again.
Marcy Bell offered her the job.
The salary was higher than promised. The pension was real. The start date was September 3.
Nancy wrote it all down on the back of a service ticket.
Then she asked, “Is there a probation period?”
“Yes.”
“Can I take Friday to think?”
Marcy laughed.
“I figured you might.”
Nancy hung up and looked at the dispatch board.
Arnie had made one change. Beneath the colored magnets, he had taped a new sign:
NANCY HAS THE FINAL WORD ON THE SCHEDULE.
Cheryl had added a smiley face in blue marker.
Nancy left it there.
Mike did not resign that week. His lawyer sent a letter accusing Arnie of trying to push him out. The company attorney answered. There were meetings in the back office with the blinds closed.
Nancy accepted the school job on Friday afternoon.
She gave two weeks’ notice.
The technicians found out before Mike did. Big Mike, who was not actually named Mike but had been called that since he was nineteen, brought in a sheet cake with crooked blue writing.
GOOD LUCK, NANCY. DON’T FORGET US.
She took the corner piece.
On her last day, she cleaned out her desk.
She found a dead battery, four peppermints, an old pay stub from 2007, and a photograph of her mother standing beside the company furnace truck. Nancy didn’t remember taking it.
She put the photo in her purse.
The World’s Best Dispatcher mug stayed on the desk.
At 4:58, Arnie came by.
He had a folder in his hand.
“Your reference,” he said.
Nancy opened it.
The letter was printed on company stationery. Arnie had signed it in blue ink.
It listed the six missed days.
It listed the emergency calls Nancy had answered from her hospital bed. It mentioned the winter of 2014, when ice took down half the county’s power lines, and Nancy had coordinated twenty-three service calls with a dead phone battery and a flashlight between her teeth.
At the bottom, Arnie had written:
If you hire Nancy Hettinger, give her the keys and get out of her way.
Nancy read that line twice.
“Did you write this yourself?”
“Mostly.”
“What does mostly mean?”
“Cheryl fixed the spelling of ‘coordinator.'”
Nancy folded the letter and put it with the photograph.
At five, she walked through the office one last time.
The phones rang behind her. Somebody called from Maine Street about a furnace that smelled like hot pennies. Cheryl answered and wrote the address on a yellow card.
Nancy reached the front door.
“Hey,” Cheryl called.
Nancy turned.
Cheryl held out the company mug.
“You forgot this.”
Nancy looked at it.
Then she looked at the dispatch board, still crowded with colored magnets, every one of them placed by her hand.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
She stepped outside.
The door shut behind her, and the little bell rang once.
If this story hit close to home, pass it along to someone who has been made to doubt their own work.
For more family drama and unexpected slights, read about the awkward seat at a family event, the rent hike after Grandma moved out, and the brother who mocked his sister’s rent.
