The Suit My Brother Left Behind

The suit hung on me the way a scarecrow wears whatever the field gives it.

The shoulders sat two inches past my own. The sleeves ran down over my knuckles until only my fingertips showed. The pants gathered at the waist in a bunch I had to hide with my hand, and they stopped too high above my scuffed dress shoes, like even the fabric was ashamed to be caught on a body it was never cut for.

Three safety pins were the only thing keeping those pants on my hips.

One of them had already worked its way open and scratched a thin sting into my side. I could feel it burn a little more with every step I took across the polished lobby floor.

Still, I walked into the tallest building for sixty miles like I had every right to be there.

Or at least I tried to.

My name is Cole. I was twenty-six years old, standing in the lobby of the Cornerstone Mutual building in the city, an hour and a half of county road and interstate from the small town where I grew up, wearing my older brother Trent’s old suit because my parents had told me I did not deserve a new one.

That was the exact word they used.

Deserve.

Not “we can’t swing it right now.”

Not “let us see what we can figure out.”

Just: you don’t get new things every time life gets hard.

The woman at the front desk let her eyes rest on my clothes for half a second too long, then went back to her screen. She was kind enough not to say anything about it.

That almost made it worse.

“Third floor,” she said, sliding a visitor badge across the counter to me. “They’ll come get you from the waiting area.”

I thanked her too fast and walked toward the elevators like the floor might open under me.

The elevator

Two other people getting hired for something stepped in beside me on the way up.

Both wore plain, well-fitted suits, the kind that did not shout money but clearly cost more than anything I had ever owned. One of them had shoes with a shine you could read a newspaper in. They stood easy. Rested. Like men who had slept the night before.

I looked like a boy who had climbed into his father’s closet on a dare.

The taller one glanced at me and gave a small, closed-mouth smile.

It was pity. I knew pity. I had lived my whole life inside it. I would have taken a laugh over that smile any day of the week, because a laugh you can be angry at. Pity just sits on you.

The doors opened on the third floor and I followed the little paper signs to a waiting room with a long window that looked out over the river and the grain elevators and the water tower with the town name on it. There was a conference table down there long enough to make anybody feel small. People with clipboards moved in and out of the offices along the back wall. The other candidates sat with straight backs and clean shoes, pretending their hearts were not going a hundred miles an hour.

I took the chair closest to the corner.

Then I set my leather folder flat across my lap to cover the safety pins.

That morning had started bad.

But if I am honest, it had started years before that.