“Your job is always here for you,” he said. “But you must learn the new system first”

Miriam often thought that if life could be compared to the celestial order of the cosmos, she would be a planet, reliable in her orbit. But when she lost the job she loved only a few weeks after her granddaughter Ayala’s engagement, she felt like Pluto, once a planet, now demoted.

The morning she lost her job started well enough. She was looking forward to the upcoming wedding. In their last conversation, Ayala had said she wanted Miriam’s help choosing linens, and she planned to visit the store when Miriam was in. Miriam anticipated the chance to lend her expertise, and the thought of taking part in Ayala’s wedding preparations made her happy.

The store was empty when she came in, so she had some time to look through the selections with Ayala in mind. She ran her eye over the new birch shelves. The sun hit the brightly colored pillows stacked in their neat diagonal row. She was pleased with the recent renovations; they made Counting Sheets a pleasure to browse. Miriam eyed a set of linen that had come in last week — white with little sprigs of pink flowers. Perfect for Ayala, she thought.

She heard the murmur of a one-sided conversation coming from the back of the store. The Rubins. The door to their office stood slightly ajar, and through the gap, she could see Young Mr. Rubin talking on the phone, his eyes focused on his computer screen.

I hope he didn’t hear me come in, Miriam thought guiltily. She glanced over at the shelf where they kept the hotel linens. That’s where she’d stored the iPad Young Mr. Rubin had given her. The one with the custom-designed POS system. He’d been after her for months to record every sale in it. But she was happy with her own system, which required only a marble composition notebook and some carbon paper.

Miriam did not like Young Mr. Rubin. He had joined his father in the business only a year before, and he had a Vision. Some of it wasn’t bad. It was Young Mr. R. who had convinced his father to renovate the store, transforming the dark, cramped space into something light and airy.

But the rest of his Vision — she didn’t like it. She wasn’t shy about it, either. Eli had heard her go on about it endlessly, and any time her children called, it was all she wanted to discuss. They knew how Young Mr. R. had overhauled the entire system; how he wanted Miriam to process all her sales using the custom program. They knew she’d hidden her tablet on a shelf. They knew she ignored the tablet and continued to use her notebook. They knew Young Mr. R. was annoyed at Miriam and persisted in his efforts to get her to use the new system.

Four months before, Young Mr. Rubin had organized a staff training day. It was laughable because the entire sales staff was made up of her and Shifra, a nice young girl who’d been in Ayala’s class, and it seemed a waste to plan something for a staff of two. But she was learning that when Young Mr. R. wanted something, he made it happen.

The staff training was given by Yitta, who looked young enough to be Miriam’s granddaughter. She handed Shifra and Miriam tablets and showed them how to use the program. Shifra caught on right away, but Miriam felt like she was swimming through honey. None of it made sense to her.

“Just keep at it,” said Young Yitta the Computer Genius. “It’s really intuitive.”

Intuitive, Miriam scoffed inwardly. She wasn’t computer illiterate. She’d used Word, and she knew her way around a search engine. This program was the opposite of intuitive, she thought, and the idea of learning something new made her tired. She imagined those dreaded prompt boxes popping up asking impossible questions. She imagined answering those questions incorrectly. She imagined the program’s unhappiness with those theoretical answers and demonstrating its dissatisfaction with her by shutting down and erasing all her data and files.

She imagined the Rubins’ ire when she’d tell them she had pressed the wrong key and erased important things. Better the Rubins’ ire remain directed toward her marble composition notebook.

She tuned out the rest of the training seminar.