The Interview Shelf Across the Street

Everett Siler came by the closet on the second Sunday in December, after church.

He had worked five weeks at Goodgrove, nineteen shifts, and Keely told me he had never once been late, had straightened the whole back stockroom without being asked, and walked Mrs. Pennington’s groceries to her car because he had noticed her cane.

He carried the suit in a plastic bag from the dry cleaner on Main Street, eleven dollars and fifty cents out of his first check.

“I wanted to bring it back clean,” he said. “The card says to pass it on.” He handed me the bag and the hanger. “And I wrote the other two words.”

I took the card out of the inside pocket. Under Goodgrove Resale. Seasonal stock. October, he had printed two words in slow, square letters.

Got it.

I did not say anything for a minute. I ran my thumb across the letters, and thought about a man in a charcoal suit in 1988 walking into a bank with a note in his pocket.

“Keely says they are keeping you on after the holidays,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am. Part-time until graduation, then full-time if I want it.” He was grinning so hard I could see where his front teeth came in crooked. “Keely says she will teach me to run the place someday.”

He stood there, not quite ready to go. “Mrs. Hatchett, the card says Loy Hatchett. Was he your husband?”

I looked at the rod, where a hundred and six suits hung on two pipes my son had screwed to the wall, and at the boy.

“He was,” I said. “He sold feed to half this county, wore that suit to every funeral for thirty-five years, and died on his way to a fish fry. He would have liked you.”

Everett nodded slowly. “Then I’m glad it fit.”

“So am I.”

I hung the suit back on the end of the pipe, smoothed the shoulders, and clipped the card inside the pocket. A girl was coming Thursday for a teller job at First State Bank, and I already knew the sleeves would be too long on her and that I would take them up myself.

The next Friday after close, Keely rolled the church’s old robe rack across Elm Street herself, in the cold, with Sturgill beside her holding a flashlight. We hung forty-two garments together, and she wrote each one in a spiral notebook with the date and her name beside every line. At the bottom of the first page she wrote one more line and pinned it to the corkboard beside my sign. Hung by hand, Dec. 18. Keely Eakin, who is in charge of it.

It is a small room, that closet. It has one window and eleven feet of galvanized pipe, plus the second pipe along the other wall and a shelf for shoes. It smells like old hymnals and coffee. It has never had a price on a single thing in it, and it has never once been free.

It has been lent, which is a different thing, and the only thing I have ever seen work.

On Thursday evenings from six to eight, a boy or a girl comes to the door and stands there a little embarrassed, and I stand up from my folding chair, and I ask the same question I asked a boy named Lonnie in the winter of 2006.

“Come on in, honey. What’s the job?”

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.