Chapter 10: The Interview

He applied to nine places inside the first fourteen days. Two called him back. One was a call center two exits down the interstate that wanted him to cold-sell extended warranties on kitchen appliances over the phone, in a windowless room with a dozen other cubicles and a whiteboard tallying everybody’s numbers for the week in red marker. The woman doing the interview seemed genuinely startled when he asked what the base pay was, like most applicants didn’t get far enough into the process to think to ask, and when she told him the number, he did the math against his rent in about two seconds and understood he’d be worse off working full-time than he currently was doing nothing at all.

The other was a mid-sized distributor of restaurant equipment out toward the county seat, a company he actually would have been glad to work for, and they called him in for what he thought was going well — good conversation, real interest in his background, the hiring manager nodding along as he talked through the accounts he’d started to learn at Mercer, asking follow-up questions that suggested she was actually listening. She said she wanted him to come back Thursday to meet the operations director, shook his hand warmly at the door, told him she thought he’d fit in well.

She called Wednesday afternoon to cancel Thursday’s meeting. “We’re going to go ahead and pass,” she said, and her voice had a careful, apologetic flatness to it that hadn’t been there two days earlier. “We just don’t think it’s a good fit given the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” Evan asked, though he already knew.

A pause. “I think you understand what I mean.”

He hadn’t said one word to her about the circumstances. He hadn’t needed to. She’d clearly made a phone call to somebody between his first interview and his second, and whatever she’d heard had been enough. He sat in his car in the parking lot after that one for a while before he trusted himself to drive, both hands on the wheel at ten and two even though the engine wasn’t running, staring at the building where he’d almost had a job forty-eight hours earlier.

He sat at his kitchen table one night — the card table from the church sale, one wobbly leg he kept meaning to fix with a folded napkin — and made a list of every company within an hour’s drive that touched anything adjacent to what he actually knew: industrial supply, food service equipment, restaurant distribution, the whole orbit of businesses that fed into and off of what Mercer did. Hawthorne Distribution sat near the bottom of that list, and he noticed himself putting it there deliberately, some leftover loyalty making him reluctant to even consider his family’s biggest regional competitor, as if applying there were its own kind of betrayal, even after everything they’d done to him. He crossed it out once, actually drew a line through it with his mostly dead pen, and then sat looking at the crossed-out name for a long minute before he wrote it back in underneath, smaller, like he was compromising with himself.

He called them anyway, near the end of the second week, mostly because the list had gotten short enough that pride wasn’t really an option he could afford anymore. A receptionist took his name, said someone would be in touch, and Evan figured that was the last he’d hear of it, the way it had gone with most of the others.

Three days later his phone rang from a number he didn’t recognize.

“Evan Mercer?” A woman’s voice, older, no wasted syllables. “This is Margaret Hawthorne. I run this outfit. You free tomorrow morning?”

He hadn’t expected the CEO herself to be the one calling. He said he was free.

Hawthorne Distribution’s building sat off the highway on a gravel lot that needed regrading, a single-story brick structure with a sign out front that could have used a fresh coat of paint, forklifts moving in the yard behind a chain-link fence, phones ringing somewhere behind a half-wall that separated the front office from whatever was happening in back. It looked, Evan thought, like a place that spent its money on operations instead of appearances, which he found he respected more than the opposite.