One Size Fits Most

Diane Yost was staying at the Orchard Inn, the only hotel in town with a breakfast room. Hank Varga asked me to come with him to the meeting.

"You're my manager, ma'am," he said on the phone. "Chain of command."

I got there at 7:50. Hank was already sitting at a corner table, back to the wall, facing the door. He had been there since 0745. I knew this because the waitress told me, in the tone people use for weather events.

He was wearing the forest-green shirt.

Pressed khakis, VARGA over the right pocket, the acorn and the two crossed trowels over the left. He looked exactly as he had on his first Monday at Underwood's. The only difference was his hands, very slightly restless on the tablecloth.

"You wore it," I said.

"She asked what I consider my uniform," he said. "I don't lie to a vice president."

"Lorna said you stood at the closet for an hour."

"Fifty-two minutes." He straightened a fork that was already straight. "It was a close vote."

---

Diane came down at 7:59. She had changed into a different gray suit. She sat across from us, ordered black coffee, and set a butterscotch beside the cup.

She looked at Hank's shirt for a long time. She looked at the patch.

"Acorn," she said.

"For patience, ma'am. The trowels are for work."

"Why two?"

"Nobody plants alone."

Diane nodded slowly. Then she did something I didn't expect. She took out the small notebook from yesterday and slid it across the table to us.

"Go ahead," she said. "You've both been wondering."

I opened it. Her handwriting was tiny and fast. The first page said Balloon arch — no. The second page said DJ — why. The third said Lemonade — sugar content?

The fourth page had been written in front of the compliance line, before the wind. It said Varga. Hem level all around. Who taught him?

Below that, in the same pencil, she had written one more line. Dad's dungarees.

"My father was a machinist's mate," Diane said. "Twenty-two years, mostly on destroyers. Every Sunday night he ironed his work clothes at the kitchen table, and nobody else was allowed to touch them."

She unwrapped the butterscotch. "I asked him once why he bothered. Nobody saw his dungarees but the engine room."

"What did he say?" I asked.

"He said the engine saw." She almost smiled. "I didn't understand it until yesterday, at the end of your line."

Hank didn't say anything. He looked down at the tablecloth, and then out the window, and then back. His jaw did something complicated.

"He sounds like a good sailor, ma'am," he said finally.

"He'd have liked your hoses."

---

She got to the point after that. Diane Yost, I would learn, always got to the point.

"I'm offering you a job," she said. "Director of Store Readiness, at corporate. You'd write a Heavy Weather Bill for every one of our two hundred stores. Hurricanes in the Carolinas, tornadoes in Kansas, ice in Ohio."

She tapped the laminated Bill, which she had brought with her. "The salary is roughly four times what you make now. And you could wear whatever you like."

I held my breath. It was a good offer. It was a very good offer. It was the kind of offer that makes a store manager start writing a farewell card in her head.

Hank was quiet for a long moment.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said. "No."

Diane didn't look surprised. "May I ask why?"

"My post is the yard." He said it simply, as if it were an inventory figure. "I spent twenty-eight years being sent where I was needed, and I'm grateful for every one of them. This time I picked the post myself."

He paused. "The begonias would never forgive me."

"The begonias," Diane repeated.

"And Merle."

"I've met Merle," Diane said. "Merle doesn't forgive weather."

"No, ma'am."

"But you can have the Bill," Hank went on. "No charge. I'll write a version for each region and train one person from every store, if you send them to me. Saturdays, before opening."

"With ironing boards?"

"If they'd like."

Diane wrote something in her notebook. "Accepted."

---

"Now," she said. "The polo."

I felt Hank go still beside me. This was the part we had come for.

"Verdance Lime is the brand," Diane said. "We have printed sixty thousand of those polos for two hundred stores. I'm not making an exception for one man, Mr. Varga, not even a good one."

"I wouldn't want one, ma'am," Hank said.

"I know. That's why I'm changing the policy instead."

She pulled a sheet of paper from her bag. It was a printed draft, already marked up in pencil. She turned it around so we could read it.

TEAM MEMBER UNIFORM POLICY — REVISED

All team members will wear the official Verdance Lime polo during every shift. Polos may be worn tucked or untucked at the team member's discretion. Pressing is encouraged. Hoses will be coiled.

"Coiled," Hank said.

"I didn't know how to spell 'flemished,'" Diane said. "I'll learn."

"And Jace?" I asked. "And page fourteen?"

"I spoke to Mr. Ulrich last night." Diane finished her coffee. "He'll be at your store at nine, with something to show you."

---

On Saturday morning, I got to the store at 6:30 so I wouldn't miss anything. I wasn't the first. I wasn't even the fifth.

The whole crew was standing in the break room in their lime polos: Merle and Kenzie, Marco and Josie, both Vukovich brothers, and everybody else.

Bea Underwood was there too, which made no sense, since she had sold the store. She was deadheading a geranium on the windowsill.

"Kenzie called me," Bea said. "Said I'd want to see this, sugar."

"See what?"

Nobody answered. At 0645, the door opened, and Hank walked in.

He was wearing the lime polo.

It was tucked now. It was pressed so precisely it seemed to have its own posture. GET YOUR GREEN ON! sat perfectly level across his back. He nodded to each of us in turn.

"Hank," I said. "Diane told you to wear whatever you consider your uniform."

"That was yesterday, ma'am, at a meeting." He tightened his belt half a notch. "Today's a workday. The crew wears lime."

Kenzie stepped forward. She looked nervous, which Kenzie never looked.

"We have something to show you," she said. "And before you say anything, it's in policy. I read it. Every word."

Then she reached up and folded back the front of her collar.

There, on the inside of her polo, sewn neatly over the heart where no customer could see it, was an acorn over two crossed trowels.

Merle folded his collar back. So did Marco and Josie and the Vukovich brothers, one of them a little late. Twelve people stood there, each holding open their lime polo to show a patch on the inside.

"Nothing on the outside," Kenzie said quietly. "Like you said."

Hank looked at the patches for a long time. He didn't say anything. His face did the thing it had done at the hotel, where something big tried to get past something disciplined.

"There were forty-nine," he finally said.

"You gave us the box," Kenzie said.

"I gave you the box." He swallowed. "I didn't think you'd sew them."

"We had help," Merle said, and nodded toward the window.

Bea held up her pruning shears and her purse. A spool of green thread was sticking out of the purse.

"Took us three evenings, sugar," she said. "Merle can't thread a needle. Merle can barely thread a forklift."

"Front's coming in," Merle said, which was the closest Merle came to defending himself.

Hank laughed. It was the first time in three years I had heard him laugh. It was a short, surprised sound, like a hose finally coming loose.

Then, slowly, he folded back his own collar.

There was an acorn sewn on the inside of his polo too. The stitches were very small and very even. Lorna, I found out later. She had done it on Sunday at nineteen hundred.

---

Jace arrived at nine. He walked in the front door, stopped, and held out his arms.

His polo was pressed. There was a crease down each sleeve. It wandered a little at the elbow.

"I took a class last night," he said. "Lorna Varga taught me over video call."

He looked down at his sleeves. "It's a very pressed energy. I'm into it."

"Elbow's off, sir," Hank said. "Come see me at lunch."

"I was hoping you'd say that," Jace said.

After that, Jace went out to the hose aisle. He tipped over the wicker bins one by one. Then he knelt on the floor beside Hank, and they started coiling.

Later, I found Hank at the edge of the yard, watching the crew head out to the benches. I asked if I could see the patch again. He folded back his collar.

Beside Lorna's acorn, the tag was still there. ONE SIZE FITS MOST.

He saw me reading it. He turned the tag to the light and read it himself.

"I told you I had never been most, ma'am," he said.

"You did."

He looked out at the yard. Twelve lime polos were spreading across the benches, pressed and a little bit ridiculous. Every one of them carried an acorn where only they could see it.

"Turns out," Hank said, "I'm most."

Then he walked out to join them. Morning inspection was two hours late for the first time in three years. He didn't seem to mind.

"Merle," he said. "Weather?"

Merle looked up at the clear blue sky over Verdance Grow Center #114.

"Fair," he said. "For a good long while."

Kenzie gave it an A-plus. She had never given anything an A-plus.