The Job Nobody Would Give Me

The sign on the gate

The one place I did not apply was Fontaine Lumber.

It sits on the highway at the north end of town, a long metal-roofed building, a gravel yard stacked with pine and cypress, a forklift, and a hand-painted sign that has hung there longer than I have been alive.

Every kid in Mamou knew it. I did not apply because I knew exactly what I had done in that yard.

In March of 2013 I climbed the back fence at two in the morning and pried the lock off the tool shed. I took a cordless drill set, a roll of copper wire, and a red steel toolbox that looked as if it might hold something.

I sold it all that afternoon at a pawn shop in Ville Platte for three hundred and forty dollars. The pills cost more than that.

I had driven past that fence a hundred times since coming home, with my eyes on the road. On the thirty-second day of looking, eight days before Mr. Hebert’s deadline, I walked past it again.

A piece of cardboard had been wired to the gate, lettered in marker. It said, “Help wanted. Yard hand. Apply inside.”

I stood across the highway in front of the boudin counter and read it three times. I walked away. I walked back. I told myself she would say no, and that she would be right.

Then a voice behind me said, “You going to stand there all day, or you coming in?”

Four minutes

Celeste Fontaine was sixty-seven that fall, five feet nothing, with white hair cut short and reading glasses on a chain. She wore a man’s flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled and held a clipboard against her hip like a shield.

I had never seen her up close. What I had heard was that she was hard and fair, and that she had buried a husband and a son and kept the yard open anyway.

She jerked her head at the building. “Come on.”

The office smelled like sawdust and old coffee. A ceiling fan turned over a metal desk piled with receipts and a ledger so worn the spine had split.

A photograph of a man with a broad forehead and a squint sat by the phone. She sat. She did not tell me to.

“You know who I am,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You know why I know who you are.”

My mouth was dry. “Yes, ma’am. I do.”

“Say it.”

I looked at her glasses, her clipboard, anything but her face.

“In March of 2013 I broke into your tool shed. I took your drill set and your wire and a toolbox, and I sold them. I am sorry. I have been sorry nine years, and I do not think that is worth anything to you.”

She waited a good while after I finished. “Can you lift?”

“My left hand is not much good. I can lift.”

“Can you read a tape?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you be here at seven-thirty? Don’t be early, don’t be late.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. “It is eleven an hour. I will not be giving you a key and I will not put you at the register for a while, and that is not on account of you. That is the insurance.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. “Ms. Fontaine, you know what I am. People are going to tell you not to do this.”

“They already have.” She almost smiled. “Four people called me about that cardboard sign this week, and I hadn’t hired a soul. They all had opinions.”

She stood and walked to a filing cabinet. She took something from the drawer and held it a second, closed in her hand. “Your hand, please.”

I held out my left, the bad one. She put a tape measure in it.

It was a yellow Stanley, twenty-five feet, the case rubbed silver at the corners. An A and an F had been scratched into the back with the point of a nail.

The metal hook on the end was bent a hair, and I knew it, because in the dark nine years before I had flicked that hook with my thumb and thought it was junk. I had carried it out of her shed in a red toolbox and left it in a pawn shop drawer.

“Alcide carried that every day for forty years,” she said. “He bent that hook on a truck bumper in 1981 and never fixed it. You have to add a sixteenth of an inch.”

My hand was shaking. The tape rattled in it.

“You carried it out of here one night,” she said. “Now you can carry it in.”

I could not speak. I stood in her office with her husband’s tape measure in my ruined hand and I cried in front of a woman I had robbed.

She tore a paper towel off a roll on the desk and held it out. She waited until I was done.

“Seven-thirty,” she said.

I did not ask her why. I would not learn why for fourteen months.