Here is how you request mast at a garden center owned by a chain with two hundred stores. You scan an ironed envelope, attach it to an email, and send it into the dark.
I sent Hank's request to the district office at 7:15 on Thursday morning. I copied Jace, because he was standing right there, and Human Resources, because I didn't know who else to copy. I added a line of my own at the top. Hank Varga is the best employee I have ever worked with. Please take this seriously.
Jace answered first. He answered in four minutes.
Hi Sadie! Love that Hank is advocating for himself!! That's such a growth energy. Just flagging that we don't have masts in our org chart, haha. Happy to set up a quick sync about polo feelings! :)
HR answered on Friday with a form called the Uniform Accommodation Request. It had checkboxes for medical, religious and safety reasons. There was no checkbox for "a man who flemishes hoses."
At the bottom of the email, someone had added a short note.
Brand consistency is not an accommodation category. Thank you for your understanding.
I printed both emails and put them in Hank's cubby. On Saturday morning they were gone. Hank didn't mention them.
He came in untucked again. A woman asked him whether her tomato plant had a disease. He said, "Aye, ma'am, early blight." It was the right answer, said in the voice of a man reading from a cue card.
Kenzie found me in the office at lunch.
"Somebody has to do something," she said. "He's at a D. He's never been below a B-plus."
"What do you want me to do? I sent the request. Corporate sent back a form."
"Go see him."
"At his house? That's weird."
"Weirder than him leaving a hose in a bin?" Kenzie folded her arms. "I watched him do it, Sadie. He didn't even look back."
I called Bea first. I always called Bea first.
She was in her backyard. I could hear her shears going.
"He's not sick," I told her. "He just looks like somebody let the air out of him."
"Course he does." Snip. "He came in wearing that shirt on his first Monday, remember? Like he'd been waiting for permission to belong somewhere."
"Corporate says no exceptions."
"Corporate says a lot of things, sugar." Snip. "A man like Hank doesn't need permission. He needs a reason. Go find out what it is."
"How?"
"Go on a Sunday," she said. "Seven o'clock. Trust me."
The Vargas lived in a brick ranch house on the north side of town, with a lawn so even it looked upholstered. The hedges were square. The mailbox was perfectly vertical. The flag on the porch had been folded down for the night, and I didn't need to ask who had folded it.
Lorna Varga answered the door. She was fifty-four, small, with silver hair cut short and a pencil tucked behind one ear. She taught band at Orchard Ridge Middle School and had for twenty years. Everything, I would learn, was tempo to Lorna.
"You must be Sadie," she said. "He's in the garage. It's seven. You know what that means."
"I really don't."
"He's ironed every Sunday at nineteen hundred for thirty-one years." She stepped aside to let me in. "On ships, in apartments, in a motel in Guam. Once in a hospital, the night our daughter was born."
"Whose clothes?"
"His, and mine when I let him." She smiled. "He tried the baby's once. The baby objected."
She led me through a kitchen where the dish towels had been folded in thirds. At the door to the garage she stopped and lowered her voice.
"He's been playing the whole week at largo," she said. "Do you know what largo is?"
"Slow?"
"Slow and broad and sad. It's for funerals and the end of symphonies." She opened the door. "Don't let him tell you he's fine."
The garage did not have a car in it.
It had a pegboard with every tool outlined in black marker, so you would know instantly if one was missing. It had a workbench, a radio playing a ballgame, and an ironing board set up under a hanging work light. It looked like an operating table.
Hank was at the ironing board in a gray T-shirt and the pressed khakis. He was ironing one of his forest-green shirts.
Five more hung on a rod behind him, identical, each with a VARGA name tape and an acorn patch. All of them had been pressed already. Some of them, I suspected, more than once this week.
"Evening, ma'am," he said. He didn't look surprised. "Bea called."
"Of course she did."
He finished the left sleeve. He set the iron upright with a small click. Behind the five green shirts, farther back on the rod, there were three long black garment bags, zipped all the way up.
"Those are the Navy ones?" I asked.
He followed my eyes to them. "Dress blues, summer whites, working khakis. I keep them pressed. I don't wear them."
"Why press them if you don't wear them?"
He thought about it. On the radio, somebody struck out.
"Same reason you water a plant you're not selling," he said.
I sat down on an overturned bucket. Lorna stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, like a conductor waiting for the orchestra to stop tuning.
"Hank," I said. "Tell me about the uniform. The green one. Why does it matter so much?"
He didn't answer right away. He hung the finished shirt on the rod and squared it so its shoulders lined up with the others.
"I retired on a Friday," he said. "There was a ceremony. They piped me ashore. Lorna cried, and I came close."
He picked up the next shirt. "Saturday I got up at 0500, like every day of my adult life. I went to the closet. And I stood there."
"There was nothing to put on?"
"There were plenty of clothes. There was nothing to put on." He spread the shirt across the board. "Do you understand the difference?"
I thought I did. I nodded anyway.
"For twenty-eight years, I knew who I was the moment I got dressed," he said. "The uniform told me, and it told everybody else. It said I'd be there when I said I would. Then one morning it was just a man in a closet."
"Eight months," Lorna said from the doorway. "Eight months in sweatpants. He reorganized my sheet music by key signature. Twice."
"It needed doing."
"It did not need doing twice."
Hank almost smiled. "Then I saw Bea's sign in the window, and I thought, that's a post. So I designed a uniform for it. Not to pretend I was still in, but to show I was all the way in, here."
He ran the iron down the shirt's front placket, slowly. Steam rose around his hands.
"The acorn's for patience," he said. "The trowels are for work. Two of them, because nobody plants alone. That patch is the closest thing I've had to a ship in three years."
The garage was very quiet. Even the ballgame seemed to have paused.
"So wear it," I said. "I'll take the heat. I'll tell them I gave you permission."
"No, ma'am," he said, setting the iron down. "I won't stand apart from the crew. If the crew wears lime, I wear lime. That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
He picked up something from the end of the workbench. It was his lime polo from that week. It was wrinkled and untucked-looking even on a hanger, the way some clothes are untucked in their souls.
"The problem," Hank said, "is that they asked me to wear it badly." He held it up to the light. "A uniform isn't the cloth, ma'am. It's the care."
"When you press something, you're telling people you showed up on purpose. They've asked me to look like I didn't. I've tried for a week. It's the only order I've ever been given that I don't know how to follow."
I didn't have an answer. Neither did Lorna, who had an answer for everything, usually in Italian.
"So what are you going to do?" I asked.
Hank hung the lime polo on the rod next to the five green shirts. It looked like a tourist at a funeral.
"I'm going to follow the policy," he said. "Every word of it. And on Monday, I'm going to be at work at 0645, like always."
That was all he would say. Lorna walked me to the door. On the porch she squeezed my arm.
"He's moving to andante," she said. "That's walking speed. That's progress."
On Monday I got to the store at 6:40. I wanted to see Hank walk in.
Merle's truck was already in the lot. He was sitting in the cab with the window down, looking at the sky.
"Morning, Merle."
"Warm front," he said. "Builds through the week."
Then he got out of the truck, and I dropped my coffee.
Merle was wearing his lime polo over the same flannel shirt. Down the center of each sleeve ran a long, sharp crease. It wasn't perfect, and it wandered a little near the elbow. But it was unmistakably, deliberately, a crease.
"Merle," I said. "Did you iron that?"
He shrugged. "First time since 1988."
"What happened in 1988?"
"Got married." He shut his truck door. "Took me forty minutes. Burned the board."
"Did Hank ask you to do this?"
Merle looked at me as if I'd asked whether the sun had asked him to come up.
"Nobody asked," he said. He walked toward the gate. "Front's moving in."
Behind me, a car door slammed. Kenzie was walking across the lot, holding a coffee. Her polo, for the first time, had been tucked in.
And it was only 6:42.
Up next: Pressing Matters
Continue to Part 4 →