The Boy Who Brought The Coats Back

The man who did not knock

Three days later I was up at the school dropping off the one box of coats I had managed to get sorted, just to feel like I had not left them with nothing.

I was standing in the closet, my closet, running my hand down the near-empty rail, when the secretary came and found me and said there was a truck at the gym doors and a man asking for me by name.

I came out into the gym and the double doors were propped open to the cold, and backed up to them was a pickup I did not know, a good newer one, and a tall man in a canvas work coat was lifting things down out of the bed.

He was carrying coats. Armloads of them. Brand new coats, the tags still hanging off the sleeves, the plastic still on some, every color and every size, from little bitty ones that would fit a kindergartner up to coats that would fit an eighth grader with room to grow.

I counted them later. Forty coats. Forty brand new winter coats, and under them in the truck, boxes of boots, and bags of mittens, and thick socks still in their store packages.

I stood there in my old apron, the one I have worn so long the red rickrack has gone pink, and I did not know this man from Adam. I thought maybe he was from a company, or a church group out of the city, somebody Mr. Garvey had found. I started to thank him the way you thank a stranger, polite and a little flustered.

He set the last armload down on the long folding table, careful, the way you would set down something that could bruise.

Then he straightened up and he turned around and he looked at me, and his eyes went soft and wet, and he read the name off the front of my apron, the way a child reads a name, out loud and slow.

“Miss Nadine,” he said.

And then he said, “You probably do not remember me.”

I looked at his face. A grown man’s face, lined a little, gray coming in at the temples. I did not know it. I told him I was sorry, but I did not think I did.

He smiled, and when he smiled something came up out of the years at me, something around the eyes, and my breath caught, but I still could not place it.

He said, “I was in the second grade. It was the coldest January anybody could remember. And I came through your lunch line in a t-shirt because I had told everybody I outgrew my coat, but the truth was we did not have one.”

My knees went. I reached for a chair.