The Interview Shelf Across the Street

“It is. Come in, honey.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“You don’t need any.” I stood up from the folding chair. “I only ask one thing. What’s the job?”

He turned the cap around in his hands. I could see him deciding whether to tell me, the way a boy does when he is not sure whether the answer will cost him something.

“Stocking,” he said. “Seasonal stock. For the Christmas rush. It’s fifteen an hour, and it goes until January, and they said maybe after.”

“Where?”

He looked up at me then, and his ears turned red.

“Goodgrove,” he said. “Mrs. Hatchett, I know. My mom said I should not even come, because of how it might look. But it is the only place in town hiring, the plant will not take me till I am eighteen, and I am saving for a truck and my little sister’s braces. I cannot go in there in a hoodie. I just can’t.”

I did not say a word. I could have told him there were other jobs. I could have told him that store had done me wrong. Instead I took a long breath and asked him to step onto the little rug by the window.

He was six-foot-two and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. The suits on the first rod were built for men who had eaten forty years of church dinners. I looked at him and I looked at the rod, and I knew what hung at the far end of it.

At the far end hung one suit that I had carried over myself on the first Sunday, held up high so the hem would not drag. It was a charcoal gray wool suit with a faint stripe, built in 1987 by a tailor in Springfield who has long since passed. It was Loy’s.

It had hung in the hall closet at home for four years. I had taken it down one Saturday morning, held it against myself in the bedroom mirror, driven it to the church, hung it on the end of the pipe, and told no living soul.

“Try this,” I said.

He put it on behind the folding screen the church used for the Christmas pageant. When he came out, Loy’s suit hung on him as if it had been waiting. The sleeves were an inch short and the waist was three inches too big, but the shoulders sat square on a boy who had never worn anything nicer than a school jacket.

I walked all the way around him once. I did not trust myself to say anything.

“Is that okay?” he said.

“It is better than okay.” I got out my pincushion. “Stand still.”

I took in the waist with six pins, let the sleeves down from the lining, and told him to come back Friday after school. When he did, I handed him the suit with the waist stitched by my own hand, a white shirt from Coach Rainey’s basket, and a navy tie of exactly the right width.

I also did what I do with every suit. I took the card out of the inside pocket and read it again.

It said, in my handwriting, First State Bank, March 1988. Loy Hatchett. Feed store loan, thirty-eight thousand dollars. Approved.

Under that, I had copied a second line in Loy’s own words, off a scrap of paper I found folded small in the breast pocket the day I hung the suit on the rod. Shook his hand twice. Looked him in the eye. Do not forget to look him in the eye.