The Interview Shelf Across the Street

“He said, Ma’am, thank you for seeing me. He put out his hand. I took it, and he shook it, and I swear to you, Mrs. Hatchett, he looked right at my face. Not at the desk. Not at his shoes. At my face.”

I did not say anything. I was not sure I could.

“I asked him the four questions I always ask, and he answered like he had practiced with somebody who took it seriously. When I asked about a time something went wrong, he said he dropped a tray in the cafeteria his freshman year in front of the whole football team, and walked back through the line.”

“And then I asked him if he had any questions for me. I always ask it. Nobody ever does. And he said, Yes ma’am. Do you ever get to leave early? Because I think you look tired.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“I laughed,” Keely said. “Out loud, in the middle of an interview, for the first time in three months. He looked so horrified that I laughed harder. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets to hide them, and something fell out of the inside one.”

She took a folded index card from her vest, soft at the edges, with a pinhole at the top, and laid it between us. “I read it before I gave it back,” she said. “I read everything. It’s a bad habit.”

First State Bank, March 1988. Loy Hatchett. Feed store loan, thirty-eight thousand dollars. Approved.

Shook his hand twice. Looked him in the eye. Do not forget to look him in the eye.

Under that, in a seventeen-year-old’s slow, careful print: Goodgrove Resale. Seasonal stock. October.

“I’m sitting in my own back office, in my own store, holding a dead man’s bank loan, and under it is the name of my company in a boy’s handwriting. It took me a second. Then it didn’t.”

“Mrs. Hatchett, you sent that boy to me in your husband’s suit.”

“I did not send him,” I said. “He came to the closet and told me the job. I gave him a loan. Everything after that was his.”

“You could have told me.”

“I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I looked at her a long time. “Because I wanted you to see the boy first,” I said. “I did not want you to see me.”

She laughed, and it came out wet. “Well. It worked.”

“Did you hire him?”

“In the first four minutes.” She wiped her face. “I would have hired him in a hoodie, too. It was not the suit. But the suit told me somebody had cared enough to dress him. And I sat there thinking about the shoebox on my counter, and the sixty-one suits in a choir closet that my store used to have.”

“Can I tell you about Sedalia now?” Keely said.

“I would like that.”

She took a breath.

“Two years ago I was an assistant manager at a Goodgrove store in Sedalia. A very nice woman, a lot like you, ran a free rack by the back door for her church. Nobody wrote anything down. Then we found out her nephew was walking that rack out to his truck every Friday and selling it at a flea market. Fourteen months, about nineteen thousand dollars. I don’t think she ever knew.”

“And?”

“The district manager asked me one question. Who was in charge of that rack?”

“And you were.”