Chapter 9: Eleven
On day eleven I started at the corner of Anselm and Route 6 and worked north.
That strip runs about a mile and a quarter.
Gas station, two fast food, a carpet place, a pizza place, a dollar store, a hardware store, a laundry, a diner, a supply company, a garden center.
I wore the grey sweater from the plastic bag and a pair of black trousers Yolanda lent me that were two inches too short.
My shoes were the canvas ones with no laces. I had bought laces. Ninety-nine cents. They were the wrong length and I tied them off short.
Delphine had told me the order of operations and she was right about all of it.
Go in person. Go between two and four, never at lunch. Ask for the manager by asking who does the hiring.
Do not say the word parole. Do not lie either, because they run you anyway.
Number one was the gas station. They had a paper sign in the window.
The man behind the counter said the sign had been up since November and the position was filled.
Number two, a fast food. The manager was nineteen.
He gave me a tablet to fill in, and the application had a box on the third screen.
Have you been convicted of a felony.
There is no way to check that box slowly. It is one tap.
Then a text field. Please explain.
Six years of my life and a woman named Nadine Okoro, in a text field with a two-hundred-character limit.
I wrote: Vehicular homicide, DUI. Sentenced at 24. Released this month. Paralegal certificate. Will provide any documentation.
Number three was the carpet place, which was not hiring.
Number four was the pizza place. The owner looked at my hands and asked if I could lift fifty pounds.
Then he asked the felony question out loud, in front of two customers, in a normal voice.
Number five did not have anybody in and I waited eighteen minutes and left.
Number six was the dollar store. They took a paper application and I filled it in standing at the end of the register counter with a pen on a chain.
Number seven was the laundry, where Delphine worked, and where I had been told not to use her name, and I did not.
Number eight was a nail salon I had not counted in my original list, so it was a bonus, and it lasted forty seconds.
Number nine was the garden center. Seasonal. They needed people in three weeks and told me to come back in three weeks.
I wrote that down. I did go back in three weeks.
Number ten was the supply company, where a woman took my application, read it right there in front of me, and put it in a drawer instead of a tray.
Different drawer. I saw which one.
Number eleven was the hardware store on Route 6 and Ninth.
It smelled like sawdust and rubber and it was the first place all day I actually wanted to work.
The man who did the hiring was about sixty, with a pencil behind his ear, and his name was on his shirt. Gus.
He was decent to me. I want that written down. He was decent from the first second to the last.
He gave me a paper application and stood there while I filled it in.
He talked the whole time about the register system and about how they were short on Saturdays.
I got to the box and I checked it.
He read it upside down, the way people who hire read.
He did not flinch. He kept talking for another few seconds about Saturdays, and then he stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and put his hand flat on the counter.
“We do background checks,” he said.
“I know.”
“It's corporate. It's not me. I don't get a say in it.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at the sheet again like it might have changed.
“Vehicular,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Anybody die?”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly and folded my application in half, and then he unfolded it, which I have thought about since.
“I'll put it in,” he said. “I'm going to be straight with you. It'll come back and it'll be a no. But I'll put it in.”
“Thank you.”
“Come back in the fall,” he said. “Sometimes in the fall they let me hire seasonal without the full run.”
I said I would. I did.
I walked back down the strip the other way, one mile and a quarter, and it took twenty-six minutes.
Eleven places. One day.
That night I wrote the eleven names on the back of the commissary receipt with the van times on it, in a column, with the date beside each one.
Then I wrote the only number that mattered at the bottom of the column.
Twenty days left on the grant.