The Interview Shelf Across the Street

Loy had written himself a note and slipped it in the pocket of his own suit, and he never told me.

I handed Everett the card. “This suit has been to one interview in its life,” I said. “It got a yes. Write the job on the next line, and when you get it, write the other two words under it.”

“What if I don’t get it?”

“Then you write that down, too, and you come back, and we find the next job.”

He took a pen from my apron pocket and wrote in his careful, slow print. Goodgrove Resale. Seasonal stock. October.

He read the line above it again. “Shook his hand twice,” he said. “Why twice?”

“So he would remember you,” I said. “Once to meet you. Once to thank him.”

We practiced that Thursday for forty minutes, and again on Friday when he came for the suit. I sat across from him on a folding chair and asked the four questions every manager asks. Tell me about yourself. Why do you want to work here. Tell me about a time something went wrong. Do you have any questions for me.

I thought about calling Keely that Friday night. I sat at my kitchen table with cold coffee and Loy’s wedding ring on the saucer, and I decided against it. The suit was not a message. It was a loan, and a loan is neither a favor you announce nor a trap. It was a boy and a good coat and a manager who would have to decide, with her own eyes, what she saw.

I did not see what happened in the manager’s office that Saturday. I heard about it three days later, on a Tuesday evening, from the woman who sat in the chair.

It was a quarter past six, and the closet was closed that night. I was hanging a bag of blazers when I heard footsteps in the fellowship hall and a small, hesitant knock on the door frame.

Keely Eakin stood in the doorway in a Goodgrove vest with a banker’s box in her arms and her daughter Sturgill holding on to her coat. Sturgill had a coloring book under one arm and was looking at the rod of suits as if it were a department store window at Christmas.

“Mrs. Hatchett,” Keely said. “Do you have a minute?”

I set the blazers down. “I have all evening.”

She put the box on the folding table and did not open it. “I need to tell you about Saturday, and about Sedalia, and then I need to ask you something,” she said. I pulled out a chair for her and a small one for Sturgill, and handed Sturgill a stack of offering envelopes to draw on.

“I had eleven applicants on Saturday,” Keely said. “For six seasonal spots. They came in every fifteen minutes, in my back office.”

“I know.”

“Ten of them came in hoodies,” she said, with no meanness in it. “Good kids, some of them. I know what a hoodie costs and what a suit costs.”

“I know you do.”

“Then the eleventh one came in at ten forty-five and knocked on the doorframe. A seventeen-year-old in a charcoal wool suit that fit better than anything I have seen on a man in this town since I arrived. The sleeves were let down, the waist taken in, and he was shaking so hard I could see his tie move.”