The Interview Shelf Across the Street

Pastor Ammons stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, and for a while he said nothing at all.

He pulled a second folding chair out and sat next to me. “Is it all right with you if I tell the Men’s Breakfast? They’re going to hear anyway.”

“Do what you want. I am going to need somebody to build me a shelf for the shoes.”

That night I called my son in Kansas City, because there are things a woman cannot let a pastor tell her child. Rodney is forty-six, an engineer, and he worries the way his father did. “Mom, you do not have to be the hero of every boy in Hyde Fork,” he said.

“I only need to be the hero of the ones who come to my door,” I said. On Saturday he drove down with a drill and a level and put up a second pipe and four shelves for shoes, and never mentioned the money again. “Your father would have done it quieter,” I told him when he finished, and we both laughed.

On Sunday I told Pastor Ammons I would like to keep the closet open on Thursday evenings from six to eight, and Saturday mornings from nine to noon. He said the church would do the cleaning and the light bill. I said I would do the rest.

Roy and the girl for the nursing home kitchen I did not make wait for Thursday. I dressed them both out of that closet by appointment on Wednesday, with Dollie Ray holding the tape measure, and both of them got their jobs.

I did not ask anyone for anything. I only hung a sign on the closet door, a plain card in my handwriting. It said, Interview closet. Thursdays 6 to 8, Saturdays 9 to noon. Take what fits. Tell me the job.

The suits started coming the second week.

Lyle Tillery from the funeral home came first, with six suits over his arm and a look of embarrassment. “I used to drop these at the store,” he said. “I figured you would want to know where I took them instead.” Kent Carlisle from the bank brought four blazers and his father’s good wool overcoat, and Coach Rainey brought eleven game-day sport coats and a laundry basket of white shirts and ties.

By the end of October the rod held sixty-one suits. By the second week of November it held ninety-one.

The cards went back in the pockets. I had asked Keely for the shoebox on that first Tuesday, and she had pushed it across the counter without a word. When I opened it at home I found every card in order, rubber-banded in bundles of ten, with a Post-it on top that said, Did not feel right to toss these. K.

I read that Post-it four times. I put it in my Bible.

Everett Siler came to the closet on the second Thursday evening.

I knew his mother’s face from the grocery, a tired woman in a poultry plant hairnet who drove a car with a taped-up taillight. I did not know the boy until he stood in the closet door with a baseball cap in both hands and boots that had been resoled twice. He was seventeen, tall and thin as a fence post, in a letterman’s jacket over a hoodie.

“Ma’am, is this the place where you can borrow a suit?”