The Interview Shelf Across the Street

It was ten past nine on a Tuesday morning in October, and Keely Eakin was working her way down the back wall of Goodgrove Resale with a scanner in one hand and a tagging gun in the other, pricing my interview shelf one suit at a time.

The scanner beeped. A little printer on her belt whined out a sticker. Then the gun went thunk, and a plastic barb the length of a staple shot through the cuff of a navy wool suit that Lyle Tillery from the funeral home had carried in the week before.

She smoothed the orange sticker flat across the breast pocket, right where a man keeps his handkerchief. Twenty-four ninety-nine. Then she moved to the next hanger and did it again.

I stood at the end of the rack with my volunteer apron still tied on and watched her do eleven of them. I want it on the record that I let her get to eleven before I said a word, because I was raised to let a person finish her work before I told her it was wrong.

“Keely,” I said. “Could I have a minute?”

“Two, Mrs. Hatchett.” She did not look up. “I have twenty-nine more of these, and district wants the back wall reset by Friday.”

“That is the interview shelf.”

“I know what it is. It’s rack fourteen.” She turned the navy sleeve toward me so I could see the tag. “It’s been an unpriced rack, and an unpriced rack is what we call shrink. That’s not me being unkind. That’s just what the word means in this business.”

I looked at the sticker on the pocket and the barb through the cuff, and I thought about some boy I had not met yet, who would one day have to sit across a desk from a stranger and keep his hands very still.

“A boy cannot wear a price gun to a job interview,” I said.

That stopped her. She looked at me for the first time that morning, and I could see that she was tired in a way that had nothing to do with that Tuesday.

“I’m sorry?”

“That sticker will leave a glue mark on the wool that does not wash out. That barb leaves a hole in the sleeve. And whoever puts this suit on will spend his whole interview holding that cuff behind his other hand so nobody sees the hole.”

“Mrs. Hatchett.” She said it gently, and that was the worst part. “It’s a suit. I price a suit the same way I price a can of beans. What it is, what it costs, what it sells for. I can’t run a store on the honor system.”

“A can of beans does not have to shake a man’s hand,” I said.

She did not have an answer for that. She stood there with the tagging gun hanging at her side, and neither one of us said anything while somewhere behind us a customer dropped a lamp shade and said sorry to nobody.

Then Keely cleared her throat and went back to work, and I went to find a place to sit down.

I should tell you who I am, because none of this will make sense unless you know what that rack was.

My name is Cleta Hatchett. I am seventy-one, and I have lived my whole life in Hyde Fork, Missouri, a town of about three thousand in the hills south of the Osage, where the football field has the best lights in the county and the worst parking.