The Interview Shelf Across the Street

We talked about the rack on the Friday of the third week, in her office with the door open. She had a spreadsheet printed on three pages, and she turned it around so I could see.

“Mrs. Hatchett, I ran the numbers from the auxiliary’s books. Over the last two years, a hundred and twenty-six garments came off that rack and never went through a register. At our tag prices, that’s three thousand, one hundred and forty dollars.”

“I know the number of suits,” I said. “I did not know the dollars.”

“I’m not saying you did anything wrong.”

“I’m saying they went on boys’ backs.”

“I believe you.” She meant it. “But I can’t put that in a system. I have a district manager who looks at a spreadsheet every Monday at seven, and nobody can tell him where a hundred and twenty-six garments went. If those suits had a price and a record, I would be thrilled. But I can’t have a free rack.”

“Why not?”

She did not answer right away. She picked up a pen and put it down. She looked at the door, and then she looked at me, and she said, “Because I worked a store in Sedalia, and I had somebody like you.”

She did not say any more than that. I did not ask. I have been in enough kitchens to know when somebody has handed me a sentence and is hoping I will not open it.

Dollie told me the same thing I would have told her. “Cleta, you can write to Springfield. They will write back in ninety days. What’s your boy going to wear Friday?”

She was right, and there were two interviews that week. A girl needed a blouse and slacks for the nursing home kitchen. A man named Roy, laid off from the lumberyard, had an appointment for a job at the county road department.

I sat down on an upturned milk crate by the donation door and watched. Keely finished the rack by ten o’clock, all forty suits with a sticker on the pocket and a barb through the cuff. She had stacked the cards from the pockets in a shoebox on the counter, and I could see the corner of it from where I sat.

At half past ten a man in a quarter-zip pullover came in with his phone in his hand, walked straight to the back wall, and started pulling hangers. He did not try on a single one. He took six to the register, where Bettina, who has been a cashier since before cell phones, rang him up.

“These are going for about ninety apiece on the resale app. I’ll be back for more if you get more.”

Bettina looked at the suits, and then at me through the doorway. It was her job to ring them up. A hundred forty-nine dollars and ninety-four cents, and the man paid cash and was gone.

I got up off the milk crate. It was not anger I felt. It was closer to the feeling you get when you drive away and realize you have left a burner on. Something that mattered was going out the door, and I did not have much time.

I found Pastor Brummel Ammons’s number on the phone in the back room. He picked up on the second ring.

“Brummel,” I said. “Is the choir robe closet still empty?”