Seven months of layaway slips in my purse and the coat was still NOT MINE.
I’m thirty-seven and I was thirty-eight weeks along, and the man who put me there had been gone since March.
Randy heard the word pregnant and heard a door.
He didn’t leave a note. He left a phone charger and a coupon for oil changes on the counter.
I worked the plant line until my eighth month and put twenty dollars a week on a navy wool coat, because I wanted ONE thing that year nobody else had worn first.
Fallon Ridge, a Thursday, four days out.
The last payment was folded into a square in my hand when I came through the doors.
The clerk already had my coat off the hold rack. Her tag said Yvonne.
“That’s mine,” I said. “It’s under Pruitt.”
She lifted it up on the hanger between us and looked at my stomach the way you look at a stain on a seat.
She said they didn’t carry anything in my range.
I said I had seven months of slips in my purse and she could COUNT THEM.
“Holds expire. And you couldn’t afford this anyway. The outlet off the highway is MORE YOUR SPEED.”
My ears went hot.
I told her to let go of it.
She didn’t. She pulled, I pulled, and eleven hundred dollars of navy wool went TIGHT between two fists in the middle of the floor.
A woman by the fitting rooms had her phone up already.
Something tore low in me then, deep, and it wasn’t the coat.
The floor went WET.
“Call an ambulance,” I said. “Somebody please call.”
Yvonne looked at the carpet. Then at the coat. Then at the carpet again.
She got her hand around my wrist and squeezed until my fingers opened.
“NOBODY IS LEAVING UNTIL THIS IS PAID FOR.”
I told her I was having a baby on her floor.
“SECURITY. HOLD HER.”
Two men in polo shirts took my arms and I heard the hanger hit the carpet.
And then a voice behind my shoulder, low, not hurried at all: “Get your hands off her. You have NO IDEA what you just did.”
The man with the store keys on his belt
He was sixty-something and he had a lanyard on and he did not raise his voice once.
The polo shirts let go of me so fast one of them said sorry to the air.
“Sit her down,” he said. “Not the bench. The chair from the back, the one with arms.”
Somebody ran for it. I got both hands on the rack post and I did not sit, because sitting felt like agreeing to be there another minute.
He looked at the carpet. He looked at Yvonne’s hand, which was still half closed on nothing.
“Did you put your hands on this woman.”
Yvonne said the item was unpaid.
“That is not what I asked you.”
He waited. He was good at waiting. He let the whole floor hear how long she took.
His name tag said Otis. He said the ambulance was four minutes out, and I have thought about that since, because nobody had called one yet when he said it. He had called it from the floor before he ever got to us. He’d been watching from the mezzanine for a while.
I got a look at his belt while the pain came back around. Store keys, twelve or fifteen of them, and one of them was a little brass one that did not match the rest.
“Ma’am,” he said, “what’s your name.”
“Dawn Pruitt.”
Something went across his face and then went away.
“Say it again.”
Twenty a week since February
You have to understand that the coat was not a coat.
In February I was two months in and I had told nobody. I was still on the line, second shift, plastics, standing eight hours on a mat with a knee that clicked. I went into that store on my lunch because it was warm and I was not ready to go back.
The coat was on a form near the front. Navy, long, wool that felt like a rug in a house where people take their shoes off. Eleven hundred dollars. I laughed out loud at the tag and a woman near me laughed too, so we were friends for four seconds.
Then I stood there.
My mother wore other people’s coats her whole life. She had a green one for eleven years that came from her sister and had a cigarette burn in the pocket lining that she never fixed because it wasn’t hers to fix, is how she put it. She died in a chair in that coat with the burn still in it.
I put down forty dollars that day. The girl who wrote the slip drew a smiley face on it. I still have that one; it’s the oldest one in the stack.
I know what a dollar is worth when you make it standing up. It is about four minutes on the mat with the knee going. So a coat like that is a number of minutes I could actually picture, and once you can picture it you can decide to spend it.
Twenty a week after that. Some weeks fifteen. One week nothing, and I went in anyway and said I was sorry, and the girl said the hold was mine as long as I kept coming.
But twenty a week does not get you to eleven hundred dollars in a year and I knew that in February, standing in front of the tag doing it in my head. The twenties were only the part I could promise. The rest had to come off the top of whatever the year handed me, and I made myself a rule that whatever it handed me went straight down the road to that store before it could turn into groceries.
The tax refund came the second week of March and I put two hundred and ninety-two of it down in one trip. The girl had to write it across two slips because the amount line on the pad wasn’t long enough for it.
Plastics ran mandatory overtime in April and into May, ten-hour Saturdays, and a Saturday is about eighty dollars once the government has had it, and I put three of those Saturdays down whole and did not tell anybody I was doing it.
In July I could feel the clock and I doubled up. Forty on a Friday and forty again the next. Once, fifty, because I sold Randy’s tool chest to a man who answered a post and he paid me in twenties and a ten out of a truck.
Twenty-nine slips. Nineteen of them are the plain kind, the twenties and the four weeks I could only get fifteen down. The other ten are the year handing me something and me driving it straight to that counter before it could turn into anything else. That is how a woman on a plant line buys a coat. A little every week so the habit holds, and then everything at once, every single time the year lets you.
I kept coming. I came in March when Randy left and put down forty because I had nothing better to do with a Friday. I came in June when my ankles started going and I had to sit on the bench by the fitting rooms afterward for ten minutes before I could walk back to the lot.
Yvonne started in July. I know because the slips change handwriting in July.
She never wrote a smiley face on anything.
The thing folded in my hand on Thursday was not a slip. It was money. Sixty dollars, folded into a square, because that was the last of it. In August I had asked at the register what was left on the account and the girl looked and said fifty-eight, and I rounded up to sixty so I would not be standing there counting singles in front of anybody. I never once checked that fifty-eight against my own stack. Why would you. It was almost nothing and it was almost done.
Sixty-two dollars over, is what I had, once you put that against the tag, and I was going to tell her to keep it, because I had practiced saying that.
Four days from my due date, I was going to carry a winter coat out to a car in September heat.
I was going to put it in the back seat next to the car seat.
The chair with arms
They got me in the chair eventually. Somebody’s cardigan went under me and I want whoever that was to know I have thought about it.
Yvonne stood by the register with her arms crossed and told the story to two people who worked there, loud enough that it was for me. That I had come in agitated. That I had grabbed store property. That she had followed the procedure for a theft in progress.
Otis was on the phone with his back half turned and I could hear him spelling my last name.
Somewhere over our heads the music was still going, some soft thing with strings in it, and a voice came on to say the store closed at nine. I remember thinking that was an odd thing for a building to say to a woman in that chair.
The pain came in a way I did not know pain could come, like something in me was being turned instead of squeezed, and I said a word my mother would have slapped me for.
The woman with the phone was still filming. She had moved to get a better angle. That is the part I did not forgive for a long time, longer than I did not forgive Yvonne.
Otis came back and crouched down, one knee, hand on the arm of the chair, not on me.
“They’re at the north entrance. Two minutes.”
“My coat,” I said.
I want to be honest about that. Thirty-eight weeks, water on a store carpet, and what I said out loud was my coat.
He looked at where it was, on the floor under the rack, sleeve out, one shoulder still on the hanger.
“Nobody’s touching it,” he said. “That’s a promise from me and I’m the one who locks the doors.”
Then he said the thing that made no sense for eleven days.
“Was your mother Corinne Pruitt? Worked the school cafeteria in Fallon Ridge, sixty-eight, sixty-nine?”
The ambulance came through the doors and I never answered him.
What the store sent me on the eleventh day
My son was born at 2:41 the next morning. Eight pounds one ounce. He came out furious and stayed that way for six weeks.
I was in that hospital three days and my aunt Sandra stayed at my place and did the dishes I had left in the sink on Thursday like a person who expected to come home.
Nobody from the store called.
On day eleven a letter came. Not from Otis. From a company office in another state, on paper with a watermark in it, and it said that following an internal review of an incident on the ninth, my layaway account had been closed and the balance refunded in the amount of one thousand and forty-two dollars, minus a restocking and administrative fee, and enclosed please find a check.
Nine hundred and sixty-three dollars.
They kept seventy-nine dollars of my money for the trouble of taking my coat away from me.
The letter also said that as a courtesy they were extending a twenty percent single-use discount to be used at any location.
I sat on the edge of my bed with the baby asleep in the laundry basket on the floor, because that is what I had, and I read the word courtesy about nine times.
Then I got out the slips.
They were in a sandwich bag in my purse, because that is where things live when you work a plant line. Twenty-nine of them. I put them on the bed in rows by date, and my hands were shaking, and I made myself do it anyway, and that is when I found what I found.
The three slips from August did not say layaway on them.
They said MISC MDSE — CASH. No account number. No name. The girl’s handwriting in July and August is not the girl’s handwriting, it is a tighter hand, all capitals, and it is the same hand that wrote my name on the hold tag Yvonne had off the rack that Thursday.
Sixty dollars in August that never went on my account.
I sat there and I did the thing I had been doing all year, which was the arithmetic.
I did it three times, out loud, the way you check a paycheck. Eleven hundred and two dollars on the bed. One thousand and forty-two dollars on their letter. The two totals are not the same total, and they are not the same by exactly the three slips I was holding.
If three of my slips were not on my account, my account was short by sixty dollars, and still showing fifty-eight owed on an eleven-hundred-dollar coat, and if my account was short, then the hold was going to lapse on its own in September, and somebody would have been standing there when it did.
She wasn’t throwing me out of the store.
She was four days from a coat.
Otis, on the phone, at a quarter to nine
I called the store from my kitchen with the baby on my shoulder and asked for the man with the keys and they said there was nobody by that name in the system.
So I said the other thing. I said tell him it’s Corinne Pruitt’s daughter.
He called back in six minutes.
He had retired in the spring, it turned out. He came in two days a week to close because the district couldn’t staff it, and he was on the mezzanine that Thursday doing a count, and he had watched the whole thing from above with a clipboard in his hands like a man watching weather.
“My mother,” I said. “How did you know her.”
“She fed me lunch for four years and she never once let me sign the free list in front of anybody. She’d put the card behind the register and hand it back after.”
I did not say anything for a while.
“I recognized the way you stood,” he said. “Both hands on the rack. She used to do that at the steam table.”
I told him about the slips. I read him the three August ones over the phone, the MISC MDSE ones, and he was quiet a long time, and then he said a thing I did not expect.
“I can’t get that coat for you. I want to say that first. It went out on a transfer to the outlet on Monday, and I know that because I signed the manifest myself and I didn’t read what was on it.”
The outlet off the highway.
More my speed.
“But the register tape is mine for ninety days,” he said, “and nobody’s asked me for it.”
I asked him what he meant by that.
“I mean I’m not going to hand it to you. I’m not going to steal for you either. But if somebody asked the district for an audit of the August cash misc line at this store, with dates, I’d have to pull it. And I’d pull it right.”
Then he said: “You’d have to be the one who asks.”
The Tuesday I drove out to the highway
Here is what it cost.
I asked. I wrote the letter in the shorthand I write in, which is not good, and Sandra typed it, and I sent it with photocopies of twenty-nine slips and I did not cash their check for nine hundred and sixty-three dollars because a cashed check is an agreement. I sat on that money for five weeks with a newborn and eleven days of unpaid leave behind me and a car that needed a belt.
That is the part nobody sees. It is not brave to hold a check. It is just cold in the house.
Sandra asked me twice why I didn’t take it and put the heat on and let the rest go, and both times I said I would think about it, and both times I put the envelope back in the drawer under the phone book without thinking about it at all.
The audit came back in the third week of October. I know almost nothing about what was in it. I know that the letter I got after it did not have the word courtesy anywhere, and that it was signed by a person with a first name, and that Yvonne Kestler’s name was not in it at all because they do not put that in writing to you.
I know she was not there in November.
They offered me twelve hundred and a written apology and I took the twelve hundred, and the apology came on the same watermarked paper as the first letter, which I thought was funny in a way I could not explain to anybody.
I went out to the outlet on a Tuesday in November with the baby in the carrier.
The coat was on a rack near the back with a tag on the sleeve. Marked down twice. Four hundred and forty dollars, and a yellow sticker over that, three-ninety-nine.
I stood there with it in my hands for a long time.
A girl came over and asked if I wanted a fitting room, and she was about nineteen, and she had a smiley face drawn on her name tag in ballpoint.
“How long has this been out here?”
“That one? Since September. Nobody’ll pay it. It’s a September coat in a place nobody drives to.”
I put it back on the rack.
I want to say I did that for a reason I could put in a sentence. I have had a year and I still can’t. It was mine and it had been in a truck and it had been on that rack in the dark with a yellow sticker on it while I was in a hospital, and I did not want it anymore, and I did not want anybody else to have it either, and those are two different feelings and I had both.
I got to the end of the aisle and I turned around and looked at it once more, hanging there with the sleeve out, and it looked like nothing. It looked like a coat.
The baby made a noise.
“He’s mad,” the girl said.
“He’s always mad.”
I bought him a hat for six dollars and I drove home.
The green one, in February
It’s February again now and the coat I wear is my mother’s.
Sandra had it in a bin in her garage the whole time, which she says she told me and I say she did not. Green, wool, older than I am. The burn is still in the pocket lining.
The twelve hundred went to the belt on the car and eight hundred of it is in an account with my son’s name on it that I put twenty dollars a week into, on Fridays, because apparently that is the only way I know how to save money.
The slips are still in the sandwich bag. I have thought about throwing them out and I have not, and I do not fully know why, except that a woman once told me to count them and then would not let me.
Otis retired for real in December. He sent a card when the baby turned one, with his handwriting all in capitals, which I noticed, and which put a cold thing in my chest for about four seconds. I got the sandwich bag out that night and laid the card next to the three August slips on the kitchen table. His capitals lean back and they are drawn slow, the way a man prints who has filled out forms his whole working life. The ones on the slips lean forward and the E’s are two strokes and the S’s don’t close. It is not the same hand. It is not close. I sat there a while longer than I needed to, because I had already known that, and I had still needed to look.
The store on the ridge closed in January. I drove past it with the window down and the lot was empty and somebody had already taken the letters off the sign, and I did not feel one single thing about it, which surprised me.
I put my hand in the pocket at the light and my finger went through the burn hole, the way it always does, the way hers must have for eleven years.
He kicked the back of my seat with both feet.
“Alright,” I said. “Alright. We’re going.”
If this one sat with you, send it to somebody who has ever paid for something twenty dollars at a time.
For more tales of unexpected twists and turns, you might like She Wanted the Eleven Yards My Grandmother Carried Over in a Trunk, Then Called Them Cheap or even My Brother’s Wedding Was Twenty Minutes From My House And I Wore The Gray Suit Anyway. And if you’re in the mood for another story with a silent observer, check out I Walked Up Kenmore Hill With An Empty Milk Jug And He Watched The Whole Way.
