The Boy Who Brought The Coats Back

The day I gave it up

It took me a week to work up to telling Mr. Garvey.

I went in on a Tuesday morning, early, when the halls were still empty and smelled of floor wax, the same smell they had smelled for thirty-two years of my life. I sat down across the desk from that young man and I told him the closet would have to close.

I said my heart could not do it anymore. I said there was nobody to take it over, that it had always just been me and Earl and the town, and Earl was gone and I was going, and I was sorry, I was so sorry, because there would be children this winter who came to that window and there would be nothing behind it.

I cried telling him. I cried like I was closing down a church, because in a way I was.

Mr. Garvey came around the desk and he held both my hands and he did not rush me. He said, “Miss Nadine, you have kept children warm in this town for twenty-two years. You do not owe this place one more thing. Let us figure out the rest. You rest.”

But we both knew there was no us to figure it out. The school did not have the money. The board had tried a line item for it once years back and it had died in a budget meeting. It had always, truly, just been me.

I went home that day and I sat in Earl’s chair in the front room, which I do not usually let myself do, and I looked at the boxes of unsorted coats still stacked in the hall, and I thought, that is the end of it then. Twenty-two winters. A good run. Nothing lasts.

I called my son that night and told him, and he was kind about it, but he lives four states away and he has his own children, and there was nothing he could do but tell me he was proud, which only made me cry again.

I did not know, sitting in Earl’s chair that night, that a phone had already started ringing in another town. I did not know that Mr. Garvey had made one call, to a man who had once asked him, years back, to let him know if the coat closet ever needed anything, anything at all, no matter how big.