The Interview Shelf Across the Street

My husband Loy and I ran Hatchett Feed and Seed on Main Street for forty-one years. Loy passed four springs ago, in the front seat of his pickup outside the Legion hall, on his way to a fish fry. I have never once been able to be angry at that, because it was a fish fry.

For nineteen years I volunteered at the Hospital Auxiliary Thrift Store on the corner of Main and Elm, Tuesdays and Thursdays, sorting donations in the back room beside Dollie Ray, who is seventy-eight.

The interview shelf started in the winter of 2006, and it started with a tie.

A boy named Lonnie, whose last name I will keep to myself, came in on a Thursday morning with eight dollars in his hand. He had an interview at the lumberyard on Monday. He did not need a suit, he said. He just needed a tie, so he would not look like he had not tried.

We had ties for a dollar. But I looked at his shirt, washed so many times it had gone the color of dishwater, and at the way he held those eight dollars like the last thing he owned, and I said, “Lonnie, what’s the job?”

He told me. I found a gray jacket close to his size, a white shirt, and the tie, and handed them across the counter. “These are on loan,” I said. “Wear them Monday. When you get the job, come tell me. When you grow out of them, bring them back or bring me something somebody else can use.”

He got the job. He came back that Thursday in the lumberyard apron and showed me his name stitched on the pocket. I have thought about the look on his face most weeks since.

I did not ask their names. I did not ask for a dollar. I did not ask why, and I did not ask whose boy or whose girl they were, though in a town like ours I usually knew before they got to the end of the aisle.

The rack grew the way those things do. People brought their husbands’ good suits after the funeral, and the whole town seemed to know where to take them.

I kept a plain white index card pinned inside the pocket of every suit. On it I wrote the jobs it had been worn to. Whoever borrowed the suit added a line at the bottom, and if the interview worked out, they wrote the two words I asked for. Got it.

Then the Hospital Auxiliary ran out of money.

It was nobody’s fault. The old hospital had become a clinic with a part-time doctor, the auxiliary ladies had aged out, and the building needed a roof. In August a company out of Springfield called Goodgrove Resale bought the store and kept the six of us who would stay on as volunteers, because a company can always use a free pair of hands.

Keely Eakin came on the first of September. She was thirty-three, with a ponytail and a clipboard and a six-year-old daughter named Sturgill who did coloring pages at the break room table after school.

I liked her at first, and I want to say that plainly, because you will want to make her the villain, and she was not one. She worked longer hours than anybody I knew.

“Everything that crosses my dock gets a record,” she told us at a Monday meeting. “If it’s in the building, it has a number. If it has a number, it has a place.”