The Bagger They Called Not Fit

That is who my son was to that store. Not a job coach success story. Not a nice gesture the company could point to. A fixture. A person people built their small daily routines around, the way you build a routine around a good cup of coffee or a porch that catches the morning sun. And a young man with his own opinions, I should add, who listened to country radio in the break room and had strong feelings about the correct way to stack a paper sack, and who would tell you so.

And on a Friday afternoon, Gene Boughton, who had been running that store for eleven weeks, decided my son was not a good fit, and told him so in an office with the door shut, and sent him home.

Pete got home from the elevator a little after six that evening, his coveralls still smelling of grain dust, and I told him in the driveway before he even got his boots off.

“I’ll go down there,” he said, and I could see it rising up in him, the thing that rises up in a father when somebody has hurt his child, the same thing that had already been rising in me for two hours. “I’ll go down there right now and I’ll tell that man exactly what I think of him.”

“And then what,” I said.

Pete stopped with one boot half off. “What do you mean, then what.”

“Then you yell at a man in a grocery store, and he calls it what it’ll look like, which is an angry man yelling, and he writes a note about it, and Bradley is still fired, and now Bradley also has to hear that his daddy got thrown out of his old job for causing a scene. What does that fix?”

Pete did not have an answer right away, because he knew I was not wrong, even though I could see it cost him something to stand there and swallow it. That is the part I want to say plain, because I know how this sounds from the outside, a woman saying her husband should not have marched down there. Pete offered. He is not a man who sits still when his boy is hurt. I told him what I was thinking, and I will tell you the same, because a reader would ask me the same thing if she heard this story, and she would be right to ask it.

I had already thought, in those first two hours, about every obvious thing a person thinks of. Call corporate. Write a letter. Call the number on the receipt for customer feedback. I had thought about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which I know a little about because I sat through a training on it once for my own job at the school cafeteria, and I knew there was probably something there, a complaint I could file, a case I could build.