The Last Night Shift

Two years I'd been renting the same navy uniform from Lucille's shop. Same jacket, same shirts, same stiff collar. I picked them up on a Thursday and dropped them off the last Friday of the month. That was the deal. That was the routine.

The shop sat on the industrial edge of downtown, right under the elevated tracks. Train rattled past every fifteen minutes. You learned to pause your sentences when it did. The whole block smelled like fried food and diesel, and her shop was wedged between a laundromat and a place that sold nothing but chain-link fencing.

Inside it was racks. Metal racks, floor to ceiling, dark polyester in every shade a security company could want. Black, charcoal, navy. One fluorescent light in the back room that flickered no matter how many times she said she'd replace it.

Lucille ran the place alone. Thirty-seven, I figured, maybe thirty-eight. Divorced or close to it, I never asked. She wore reading glasses on a chain and a pencil behind her ear and she talked to me like I was a line item. Sign here. Initial there. You tore the pocket on this one, that's a replacement fee.

I didn't mind. I liked the routine of her, honestly. I was twenty-seven, worked nights at the tower on Fifth, took community college classes during the days I wasn't sleeping. Not a lot of routine in my life. Hers was the steadiest thing I had.

The inspections were the part that changed over time.

First year, she barely looked at me. Held the jacket up, checked the seams, handed it back. Thirty seconds.

Somewhere around the second year she started making me put it on. "Fitting check," she said. "New supplier." She'd circle me with a tape measure, tug the shoulder seam, mutter numbers to herself. Her fingers were quick and cold from the back room, which was always ten degrees colder than the shop.

Then the tugs got slower. The circles got closer. Once she smoothed a wrinkle across my back with her whole hand, flat, like ironing, and I stood there like an idiot not breathing.

I told myself it was nothing. She touched a hundred uniforms a week. I was just the one that walked and talked.

But I started noticing things I shouldn't. The pencil behind her ear was chewed at the end, but it was a pencil. She hummed when she did paperwork, some old song, off key. On slow Fridays she kept a crossword going and she'd ask me clue questions without looking up. "Four letters, stubborn animal."

Mule, I said. She wrote it in and said, "Huh," like I'd surprised her.

I was twenty-five when I moved to the city. Temp jobs, warehouses, a month at a call center I don't talk about. Took the guard gig two years ago because it paid for tuition and it was quiet. Nights alone in a lobby. I did homework between rounds. I graduated in May, actually. Nobody made a fuss about it. I didn't tell her that either.

Last Friday of the month. October. I came in at nine, fifteen minutes before close, with the uniform folded over my arm.

She was in the back room, up on a step stool, dragging shirts off the top rack. The light flickered. The train went by and the whole wall hummed.

"You're early," she said, without turning around.

"Fifteen minutes. That's on time for me."

She stepped down and took the bundle from my arm. Unfolded the jacket, ran her thumb along the cuff. "Pocket's fine this time."

"There's a compliment in there somewhere."

"Don't push it." But her mouth did a thing at the corner. Small. I'd learned to catch those.

I was about fifteen seconds from the door when she called my name.

"Donald. Wait."

I turned in the narrow aisle between racks. "Yeah?"

She had the clipboard with my account on it, tapping the pencil against it. Tapping, tapping. "The new shirt batch comes in Monday. Different cut. I need to do a final measurement on you before I finalize the order quantities."

"Tonight? I'm off the clock. I'm not even wearing..."

"It takes five minutes. Shirt off, arms out, done." She was already walking back toward the fitting area. "Unless you've got somewhere to be."

I had a microwave dinner and chapter twelve. "No," I said. "Nowhere."

She hung my jacket on the hook and pointed at the bench. "Shirt."

I pulled my undershirt off over my head, and the navy work shirt underneath, and stood there in my jeans with my arms out like I was getting frisked. The back room was cramped. Her elbow brushed the rack behind her when she lifted the tape.

"Shoulder first," she said.

She stretched the tape across my back, from seam to seam. Her fingers landed on the skin at the edge of each shoulder. Cold. I counted the train, because the train was coming. Three. Four.

It didn't come.

"Same as spring," she said, and didn't write anything down. She measured it again. Her thumb dragged along the top of my shoulder, following the seam line of an old shirt that wasn't even on my body anymore. Just my shoulder.

"Lucille."

"Hm."

"You measured that twice."

"I know." She didn't pull away. Her fingertips stayed where they were, resting on my skin just below the collarbone, light, like she'd forgotten they were hers.

The fluorescent light buzzed. The neighbor's TV came through the wall, some laugh track, canned and far away.

"Arms up," she said, quietly.

I put my arms up. She measured around my chest, and I felt the tape tighten and her knuckles graze me through the motion, and she read the number out loud in a voice that wasn't her clipboard voice.

"And that's..." I started.

"Needed," she said.

I laughed, short. "That's not a number."

"It's the only one that matters tonight." She stepped back half a step. Looked at me over the glasses, and then took the glasses off. That was new. She hooked them on her collar and looked at me with just her eyes, and her eyes were doing something the clipboard never did.

She came back in and fixed my collar. There wasn't a collar. I was standing in a back room in my jeans with no shirt on. She fixed it anyway, two fingers inside an imaginary collar, straightening it against my throat, and the backs of her fingers sat there under my jaw.

"Tell me something," she said. "The fabric. The new batch, it's a tighter weave. Stiffer. Some of the guys say it chafes at the neck."

"It doesn't chafe."

"Sure?"

"It's..." I swallowed and her fingers moved with it. "I like it. Honestly. The tight ones. I like the way it feels."

Her hand went still.

"That so," she said.

"A little tight. Yeah. It feels like it's doing something. Holding you together."

She was quiet for a second. The train finally came and the wall hummed and both of us let it fill the room. When it was gone she said, "Most men complain."

"I'm not most men."

"No," she said. "I'm starting to get that."

Her fingers came out of the imaginary collar and trailed down, slow, over the top of my chest, and stopped just above where my heart was doing a very unprofessional job. She looked at her own hand like it had betrayed her.

"This is a fitting," she said. It didn't sound like she believed it.

"Best one I've ever had."

"Donald." My name again, different that time. Lower. She took her hand back and hugged the tape measure against her chest with both arms, like a shield. "I've got a crossword that needs finishing. And you've got chapter... whatever chapter."

"Twelve."

"Twelve." She nodded at the bench. "Shirt."

I pulled the navy work shirt back on. She watched me do up the buttons and didn't pretend she wasn't. When I got to the collar she reached out one more time and tucked the tag flat against my neck. Her thumb pressed there a beat longer than a tag requires.

"Same time next month," she said.

"I'll be here."

"You always are." She turned back to the rack, back to business, and picked up her pen. Then, without looking at me: "Seven letters. Longing."

"That's a crossword clue?"

"It is now."

I walked home with my jacket over my arm and the train rattling above me, and I thought about two years of tape measures, and how none of it had ever felt like tonight.

I got two blocks before I stopped. My book was still on the bench in the back room. Chapter twelve, half read, corner eared. I stood under the tracks with the diesel smell and my jacket over my arm and I thought, well. That's as good an excuse as any.

I walked back. The CLOSED sign was up but the lights were still on. I knocked on the glass with my knuckle.

Lucille came around the counter with the pencil still behind her ear. She looked at me through the door.

"Forgot something," I said.

"Your book?"

"My book."

She let me in. The train came while she was turning the deadbolt, and the whole storefront rattled and we both stood there and let it.

"You could've brought it Monday," she said.

"I could've."

"That's what I thought."

The back room light was still flickering. My book was on the bench where I'd left it. I picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket and neither of us moved toward the door.

"You want your crossword answer?" I said. "Longing. Seven letters. Yearning is eight."

"I did it already."

"Already?"

"While you were walking home. I'm fast when I'm mad at myself."

"You're mad at yourself?"

"I measured your chest twice, Donald. I've measured forty men this year and I've never done that."

The train was gone. The quiet came back with the TV laugh track through the wall.

"Maybe the batch is off," I said.

"It's not the batch."

"I know it's not."

She looked at me. Then the train came again, early or late, I don't know, and the racks shook and the hangers clicked together like teeth, and she stepped in close. Almost against me. Her hip touched the bench edge and her hand came up and flattened on my chest, over the shirt, over the pocket where the company patch was.

"The stitching on your jeans needs checking too," she said, quiet. "Seam can blow at the knee. Bad batch."

"Bad batch," I said.

"That's right."

I don't remember deciding to unbuckle my belt. I remember my hands doing it and my face