The Job Nobody Would Give Me

What she had been carrying

In January of 2024, fourteen months after she gave me the tape, Celeste asked me to stay after closing.

She pulled a chair beside the desk and poured two small cups of coffee from the pot that had been on since morning. Her hands were not steady, which I had never seen.

“I have a son,” she said, “and I had a son.”

I waited.

“His name was Armand. He was thirty-four.” She turned the photograph on her desk, the one with the squint, and I saw there were two frames. I had only seen the front one. Behind it was a young man in a Mamou High jacket with her chin and his father’s eyes.

“He went to prison at thirty, for pills. Three years. He hurt his back hauling for an oil company and took too many, and then he sold some to pay for it, and a judge sent him away. He came home on a Friday. I sat him at my table and made him a plate. He told me he was done, and I believed him, Jude, because I wanted to, and because he looked it.”

She did not cry. She was a woman who had done her crying a long time ago.

“He applied at forty-one places in this parish. He kept a list in his own handwriting. I found it after. Every one said no. He went to the feed store and the sawmill and he came here, to his own father’s yard, and Alcide said no. Alcide was afraid, for the yard and for me and for himself, and he was wrong. He said so to the day he died. He said it was the worst thing he ever did.”

She drank some of her coffee. “Armand lasted fourteen months. They found him in his truck behind a closed gas station on Highway 13. He was thirty-four years old and I had not hugged him in a year.”

A truck went by on the highway and the rattle of it filled the whole office.

“I made a promise,” she said. “Not out loud, not to anyone. I said the next one who came to me with a bad name and a good pair of hands would get a job and a ride to the bank and a woman to wait in the car.” She set down her cup. “Two years after he died, you broke into my shed.”

I put my face in my hand.

“I was furious. I was out of my head with it. Alcide wanted you put away for the full twelve years, and he said so, and I understood him. But I went to the clerk and I asked if I could write the judge.”

My head came up.

“I wrote four pages. I wrote that you were a man who had been hurt, that the pills had you, and that if the court was going to send you away I wanted you sent somewhere you could get help and not just time. I wrote about Armand. I said I wanted one boy to come home from this one. Then I never mentioned it to anybody. I did not think you needed to know.”

I sat in that chair a long time. Inside, I had been put into a treatment program that nobody explained to me. I had thought it was routine.

I had gone in angry and come out different, and a counselor there had put a phone number in my pocket. For nine years I had told myself it was luck.

It was her. It had been her the whole time.

“You did not have to hire me,” I said, when I could.

“No,” said Celeste Fontaine. “I did not have to. That is the only reason it counted.”