The Interview Shelf Across the Street

“I was. A written warning, two weeks without pay, and the promotion I had worked four years for, gone. I was a single mother with a four-year-old and a lease. When they gave me this store, I swore nothing would leave it without a record.”

She was crying openly now, and she did not seem to mind.

“So I stood in front of your rack and I did not see you. I saw her. I saw the nephew. I saw a man in Springfield asking me the same question. I thought, it does not matter how good she is. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” I said.

“I know that now.”

“The rule you wrote,” I said, “was written to stop a thief. It was a good rule for that rack in Sedalia. But a rule cannot tell a thief from a boy. It scans them both the same.”

She nodded slowly.

“A person can tell the difference,” I said. “A person gets it wrong sometimes, and then you can look her in the eye and ask her what she was thinking. You cannot look a policy in the eye and ask it anything.”

“So what you’re saying,” Keely said, “is that your rack needed a person in charge of it.”

“I am saying that generosity needs a person in charge of it,” I said. “Not a policy about it. A name. Somebody who can be asked.”

She sat for a long time. Sturgill leaned her head against her mother’s arm and went on drawing.

Then Keely wiped her face, opened the banker’s box, and began taking out sheets of paper.

“I called Mr. Garrity at district Sunday night. I told him my suit and blazer sales are down sixty-one percent in three weeks, because every good suit in the county stopped coming to my store and started coming to your closet. He asked me what in the world happened to my back wall.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I took a gift out of the building, and the building noticed.”

I smiled. I could not help it.

“He did not laugh. But he did not fire me, either. I asked him for something, and he said it was the strangest request in twelve years, and he said yes, as long as it was in writing and I was the one signing.”

She laid the first sheet in front of me.

“Goodgrove tags everything for six weeks, and what doesn’t sell we bale and sell by the pound to a rag buyer. Every Friday there are about forty pounds of good clothes headed for that baler. I want them to come here. I will pull them myself, log every garment by hand, put my name on every line, and drive them across Elm Street after close.”

I looked at the paper. There was a signature at the bottom in blue ink, and under it, in smaller print, Keely Eakin, Store Manager, Goodgrove Resale, Hyde Fork.

“I do not need a log,” I said. “I have the cards.”

“I know you don’t need it. I do. I want a name on this, and I want it to be mine. And I want you to teach me the rest of it. The question. The shoebox. All of it.”

I said yes by pouring her a cup of the church’s terrible coffee. We stayed until eight, while Sturgill fell asleep on a pile of angel wings, and I showed Keely how to pin a waist, and how to write a card, and how to ask the one question without making it sound like an interview.