Katie

I like to think that I care about all my customers. It’s a broad principle, but it’s true. Every customer gets my sincere attention and interest. Some people forfeit this privilege by being jerks, and they represent exceptions to the rule. There are other exceptions that exist on the opposite end of the spectrum of my caring. Exceptions like Katie.

Katie came into the shop in October. I remember that she was wearing a sweater, but I also have the distinct impression upon my memory that she was underdressed for the weather - that she was cold. Maybe it was the way she kept pulling at the sleeves of her dark sweater so that only her fingertips stuck out at the end. Maybe it was the way her narrow shoulders would shiver at random intervals. 

But that makes her sound dishevelled. In actual fact she was meticulously neat in appearance. Her blonde hair was immaculately brushed and hung in a simple ponytail. Her clothes were clean and well-fitted apart from the long sleeves of her sweater. She was not particularly beautiful but she appeared healthy, if ever so slightly drawn and pale.

I was busy when Katie came in and so was everybody else. I was the first one to free myself from my current customers and when I got to Katie, she was wandering through the “red zone” where our ties and shirts are displayed. She was keeping her sweater-mittened hands to herself, as if shy of touching any product.

I said “Good afternoon” or “Good morning” or whatever time of day it was. I can’t remember that detail.

Katie said ‘Oh hi.’ and she seemed reserved. Normally I would have expected her next words to be ‘I’m just browsing.’ It was that kind of tone. Customers use it all the time to push sales staff back and buy themselves space.

‘Doing a little tie-shopping?’ I prompted. 

I had my own exit line ready. She was going to say “Yes.” and then I would say “Well if you need anything, just throw something at me. I’d love to help.” I would smile. She would laugh politely and agree to the terms of the arrangement. Then I would give her space until she’d picked out the ties she wanted. It was a familiar routine and one that we would both be comfortable with. I was already half-turned, ready to walk away.

But that’s not what happened.

‘I’m Katie,’ she said.

Her voice was soft and polite. She was looking right at me. There was nothing desperate in her calm, unaffected gaze, but its directness betrayed a faint disquiet that was nestled in the dark behind her eyes. It’s not normal to have a customer start a conversation like that. Most people don’t give you their names unless you ask for it. Most people would prefer not to need me. Something about this young woman was different.

‘Hello Katie,’ I said. ‘‘Pleasure to meet you. My name’s Owen.’

‘Oh!’ she said, and she gave me a sheepish, lopsided smile. This was back before masks. Her smile was crooked, but the teeth were straight and bright. ‘I could use some help,’ she said, dropping her gaze and directing it toward the concept table between us. 

‘Speak on,’ said I.

‘I’m trying to find a gift for my boyfriend,’ said Katie. ‘It’s his birthday on Tuesday. I was hoping for a shirt and a tie.’

‘Oh how lovely,’ I said. When I spoke, I found that my voice was quiet. I didn’t know why. Maybe I was just matching her own gentle tone as I might match the gruff or blunt language of a gruffer, blunter customer. However, even my movements as I walked around the table to approach the shirt cubes were slow and gentle. It was as if I was being careful not to startle this fair-haired little creature; as if she might bolt for cover at too loud or sudden a word.

‘I know his size,’ Katie said. ‘He’s seventeen and a half, thirty-four/thirty-five.’ She bit her lip nervously and watched me for a reaction. Before I could respond, she blurted: ‘If that makes sense.’

‘Well look at you go!’ I said. ‘That makes perfect sense.’ I moved toward that size in the wall. ‘You’re so prepared!’ This wasn’t empty flattery. Most people gift-shopping for shirts come into the shop fully ignorant of the recipient’s size.

She laughed happily and followed me toward the shirts. In a low, confidential tone she said, ‘I checked the size in one of his dress shirts before coming in.’

Again, that’s all anybody needs to do when shopping for shirts. Yet here was Katie being more prepared than ninety percent of my gift-buying customers. 

‘Good thinking,’ I said. I took a knee by the cubes that contained her boyfriend’s size. ‘Did you have a colour in mind?’ I waved at the shirt collars while mentally doing a quick inventory of what we had available. 

‘Oh dear,’ she said. 

I glanced up sharply.

I don’t know how well I have been communicating my impression of this young woman so far. I hope my reader can tell that she had taken me out of my rhythm. She had forced me to abandon my usual, busy cadence of loud comments and quick jokes. I was jarred and wary. In the one, solitary minute that I had known Katie, she had already awoken in me a certain protective instinct. I hadn’t had a chance to consider what, specifically, caused me to want to make sure that Katie was safe. All I knew was that I was so struck by this concern for her that a hearty pressure filled my chest.

I glanced up sharply because she had gone from laughing to speaking in a broken voice at a single, seemingly innocuous question.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She shook her head and furrowed her brow. She stepped closer to me and scanned the shirts intently.

Instinctively, I stood and stepped out of her way. I gave her space that she didn’t ask for. We hovered a few feet from each other for a minute, both of us inspecting the shirts in silence. Her hands were politely folded in front of her. Mine were thrust heavily into the pockets of my suit coat.

‘There’s quite a bit of selection to choose from,’ I said lamely. I held out a hand to indicate the boundaries of the size. ‘Seventeen and a half starts at the white shirts here and ends with the black shirts right beside you there.’

‘Oh okay.’ Katie said. 

The silence returned for a few beats and then she glanced up at me without saying anything. She didn’t communicate helplessness in her expression, but her body language was awkward, begging me to contribute further to this process.

‘Does he wear dress shirts often?’ I asked. Maybe I could recommend a staple. A white or a blue. Something easy and basic that we could both fall back on. Something that would make this oddly-intense interaction shorter.

‘Oh yes!’ she gushed. ‘He dresses so well. He wears suits for work.’

‘Well there we go,’ I said cheerfully. ‘What colours are his suits?’

A faint look of panic crossed her calm features. ‘Oh…!’ she breathed worriedly. 

I stepped backwards toward the suit wall behind me and motioned for her to follow me. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you see if you can spot some familiar colours over here and I’ll pull them out. It’ll help us pick the shirts.’

‘That I can do,’ she said with spirit. She followed me closely.

We pulled out a navy, a black and a couple greys. Nothing radical, but a decent core selection of suits. I removed the hangars and, folding the suits in half, I fanned them out on one of the concept tables so that we could tuck shirts under their lapels and consider the colour combinations we were creating. 

‘Alrighty,’ I said. ‘This I can work with.’ I didn’t ask her to pick out any colours. 

This time, I approached the shirt cubes by myself and quickly pulled out four shirts - two solid, conservative colours and two with bright patterns. I brought them back and inserted each of the shirts under a suit that I thought complimented it well.

‘Oh see,’ said Katie. She stood on the opposite side of the table and hugged herself. ‘This looks so good.’

‘These are all slim fit,’ I said. ‘Do you think that that would work for your boyfriend?’

‘Oh yes!’ She said, smiling. ‘He’s very fit.’

‘Okay. Good. Feel free to move them about,’ I said. To lead by example, I removed the striped pink shirt from under one of the grey suits and tucked it into the navy. ‘All of these shirts can be worn with all these suits.’

‘Oh really?’ she almost whispered. She reached out to touch the shirts and as her hand slid past the sleeve of her sweater in which it had been hidden, I saw that she had the most graceful, slender hands. I also saw that her knuckles were dried almost grey and cracked in places. 

I felt Katie glance up at me and I looked away from her hands quickly.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to have versatility within your wardrobe.’ The words spilling out were old, familiar phrases I had spoken a thousand times before. I didn’t have to think as I said: ‘There’s no sense having a shirt that only works with that one suit in your wardrobe.’ or: ‘If you have a new shirt that works with four of your suits, then with that one shirt you’ve created four new outfits.’ I didn’t have to think as I said any of it, which was just as well, because what I was actually thinking was, “no wonder she wears her sleeves so long” and “I hope I wasn’t staring”.

Katie was nodding agreeably as I spoke and feeling a white shirt with small, dark blue dots. Cautiously, she moved it, putting it against the black suit. She studied her handiwork as if expecting something to happen. She rolled her eyes up at me without tilting her head. ‘Like that?’ she said.

I nodded but, without thinking, I also shrugged. ‘Exactly. That’s a totally appropriate combination. That shirt would work with every single suit in this store. It’s the beauty of the thing.’

The shrug had not been maliciously meant.

But Katie withdrew. Her hands worked their way back into the shelter of her sweater and she crossed her arms, hugging her slender frame with a short, suppressed shiver. She stepped back from the table. Her eyes, cautiously bright just a moment before, became unfocused, almost sleepy. She seemed to be looking into the middle distance somewhere between her nose and the tabletop. 

‘You choose one,’ she said dully.

 In the moment it wasn’t clear to me what was happening. Again, that image of a wild animal bolting for cover flashed before my eyes. I tried to assume a reassuring posture without being condescending.

‘You’ll know better than I will,’ I said. ‘You know his tastes. I don’t know the first thing about what he normally likes to wear.’

She shrugged.

I saw my own action mirrored in her stubborn body language and understood. I pointed to the shirt/suit combination she had created. ‘For example, Katie, this looks fantastic. He’d probably look great in this, wouldn’t he?’

Her shoulders relaxed and she unfolded her arms. She looked where I pointed and I thought I could see some gladness in her eyes. For all that, she didn’t come closer. She stayed a step back from the table.

‘I don’t know,’ she said softly, tiredly. ‘He doesn’t like anything I buy him.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to play it off as a joke - to laugh and say “I’m sure that’s not true” but I couldn’t. Somehow it felt like it would be wrong to be reassuring in this moment. It’s not that I thought there were sides to be taken (and if there were, I was sure that she would staunchly take that of her boyfriend) but somehow I had to be loyal to the person in front of me and that required me to allow her to be right about this.

So I said, ‘Oh dear,’ and that was it.

‘It’s true,’ she said. She stepped closer and leaned her thin form against the sturdy table, her hands still clasped neatly in front of her. She glanced at me to see if I was disapproving.

I was not. I was losing heart. I know what expression was on my face and it was one of moderate concern.

Something about the moment excited her confidence. She reached up and moved a solid blue shirt - a slim fit Calvin Klein - from suit to suit experimentally. When she spoke again, it was so quietly that I had to lean forward to make out what she was saying.

‘He won’t even tell me,’ she said. ‘He’ll just return it. He’s so much fancier than I am. I never get it right.’

But then she remembered herself. With a suddenness that made me raise my eyebrows in surprise, she folded her arms and stepped back from the table just as she had before. A faint blush moved under the pale skin of her face like a weak light seen from across a smoky room. A pained expression flashed across her brows and I wondered if she was biting her hard-pursed lips.

‘Well then,’ I said quickly, ‘why don’t we pick something as versatile as possible? Something that he’ll be sure to get use out of.’

I hoped that she would pick the shirt that had originally caught her attention. Those little dark blue dots were hardly daring and it would have been a good selection. I told her so, but she was intimidated by the idea of buying her boyfriend something with a pattern. Instead, she chose the blue Calvin Klein. It was a very safe choice, but in its immense safety it was left utterly devoid of personality. I cashed her out and bid her adieu. She had been in the shop no more than fifteen minutes.

My reader should know that on that day there were easily 40-50 customers in the shop. This was also true the next day and the day after. Business was good for the next month or so. I don’t know how many customers would have gone through. A thousand? More? I spoke to many of these and of those hundreds that were “my” customers, I learned almost all their names. I also forgot most of them shortly after they left.

But when, about five or six weeks later, a narrow figure in an oversized cream sweater came darting through our doors, I knew exactly who it was.

It was a quiet day and the shop was empty except for an older couple that Chip was helping in the suit wall. I had been chatting with Nancy when the door opened.

‘Katie!’ I called cheerfully.

She was already halfway to the shirt cubes, moving quickly, when I greeted her. She froze in place and turned to face me. In her slender hands she held a familiar shopping bag bearing our shop’s logo. She said nothing and waited until I had walked over to where she stood. 

‘Hi Owen,’ she said brightly. 

‘What brings you in today?’ I asked. ‘Did he like the shirt?’

‘Your memory is so good,’ she said. ‘Do you remember everyone’s names?’

‘Depends on the day,’ I said with a laugh.

She held up the bag sheepishly. ‘Can I still exchange this?’

I took the bag from her and dropped it on the front concept table. I removed the blue Calvin Klein. It was still folded and pinned. Its collar was still held straight by crescents of cardboard and plastic. He had never even tried it on. More than that, she had said that he would return it without telling her. Yet here she was, bringing us back the offering he had rejected.

I took a deep breath, allowing myself to move past the angry disappointment I experienced on her behalf. I forced a smile and denied myself any expression of sympathy. If she was being a sport about this, then I wasn’t going to dampen the moment with my own sentimentality.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Did you want to pick out a different shirt?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Do you still have the other one we were looking at?’

You, my reader, remember what that other shirt was. You just read about it a moment ago. It was white with dots. I, however, had discussed thousands of shirts in the five or six weeks since I’d last seen Katie. 

‘You’ll have to remind me,’ I said. 

I glanced in the shirt’s collar in search of its size tag. Seventeen and a half, thirty-five. I moved to where this size was stored, still racking my brain in the hopes of recalling what shirts we’d looked at. As I knelt to search the cubes, I saw the striped pink shirt that I’d pulled last time and recognized it. 

‘No,’ said Katie as I removed it from the cube. ‘It wasn’t that. It was white. It had little blue dots.’

Which was all I needed to know. 

‘Here you go,’ I said, passing the correct shirt up to her.

She was standing so close. Like last time, I found myself rising and stepping away from her without thinking. I waited patiently while Katie stared at the shirt. I don’t know what was going through her mind, but it was almost a minute of silence before she was satisfied with her inspection.

‘Okay,’ said Katie with a nod, ‘Do you think I should get a tie?’

‘Well we do have a promotion on ties,’ I said. This was generally true back then. In those days the ties were either “Buy One, Get One ½ Price” or “BOGO”. On this particular day, they were BOGO.

‘I see that,’ said Katie. ‘Buy one, get one free.’ She held the shirt out to me. ‘What ties would look good with this?’

‘A lot of ties would look good with that,’ I said. I began to discuss broad principles of tie/shirt pairing. I didn’t take the shirt from her, but began to choose ties from the tables and place them against the shirt to demonstrate the points I was making. 

She followed me so closely. It didn’t seem to bother her that there existed no meaningful personal space between us. It seemed a miracle that we never collided; that our shoulders never brushed. As we talked about colours and patterns, I noticed that she was much more at ease than on her last visit. Her elegant hands pawed through the ties without any timidity at all. She laughed and joked. She commented on ties that she particularly liked and ties that she thought were too “old man” or “so ugly”. 

At last we were back at the concept table. I put the shirt down and we laid the half-dozen ties that we’d liked down next to it. I allowed her to slowly, thoughtfully hold each up to the shirt in turn. With each tie, she had a comment about what her boyfriend would think of it.

Then, quite abruptly, she said: ‘I don’t suppose you make it this hard for your wife to buy you a gift.’

And I guess I was surprised that she mentioned my wife. Sara hadn’t come up in conversation - I had not so much as mentioned that I was a married man. Not that I was hiding it you understand: I was wearing a wedding ring, and I suppose that it was from this that she had deduced that I was married. 

I looked up from the ties and saw that Katie was watching me carefully. I had no time to think about how I should respond. What I blurted out in reply felt hasty and inelegant.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever found something wrong with what my wife gifts me. Maybe that says more about how good she is at gift-shopping than it does about me.’

‘That’s so sweet,’ said Katie quietly. She returned her gaze to the ties. Her chapped hands moved them about distractedly. 

At the time, I wondered if I had made her feel bad. Maybe she would compare herself negatively to my wife’s competence. Maybe she would question how much happier her boyfriend would be if he had a girlfriend like Sara instead.

Afterwards, my mind wondered less becomingly. I am uncomfortable admitting it, but I don’t gain anything by making myself look flawless. I wondered how things might have been different if I’d denied my marriage. I wondered if Katie would have accepted the obvious lie. I wondered if she would have stood even closer to me and perhaps spoken even more softly.

But I think that those idle thoughts - besides being ignoble - were deeply inaccurate. I want my reader to see this matter as I do. I don’t think that Katie was hitting on me. I certainly don’t want it to be true. If she was testing me in that moment, it was to confirm her belief that I was a safe person. Had I issued a transparent lie about my wedding ring or tried to flirt with her, I genuinely believe that she would have hastily withdrawn. Katie had no need of another selfish, manipulative man in her life.

In the end, Katie decided not to buy the shirt at all. She bought two ties that we both agreed were the best of the bunch. She returned the blue shirt and left, happy, with the ties in the same bag she’d brought in.

After she left, I walked back over to Nancy, to resume my conversation with her. 

‘How’d you know her?’ Nancy asked. It was a fair question and not rudely meant. I know a lot of our customers from one circle or another.

‘Here,’ I said.

‘Oh!’ Nancy was surprised. ‘The way you greeted her was as if she were a friend of yours.’

And I suppose she was right.

Katie came in again two days later. 

I was speaking with a customer when she came in, but took the time to smile and wave at her. I don’t know if she saw me or not. She didn’t look about for me, which I would have expected. Instead, she moved quickly to the counter and took two ties out of her purse along with a receipt. She put them on the counter and Keith returned them for her. I considered excusing myself from my current customer, but then I thought better of it. I turned back to the matter at hand. I can’t even remember what that matter was… A suit? Probably. Who cares. 

All I knew was that I would spare her the embarrassment of being noticed by me. She hadn’t sought me out and I wouldn’t seek her out. I would let her return the ties in anonymity.

I carried on working. I was talking about why collar rolls are a thing when I heard the door of the shop slam closed in the background behind me.

I never saw her again.

Combined, I spent little more than a half hour with her, yet I could make such theories - you could too - about Katie from this story. But there’s not really anything one can do about such speculation. Almost everyone is hurting in some way or another. When you work with the public, you interact with thousands of hurting, yearning souls. You face multiple cases of it daily. How much can you care for each? How much can you carry their burdens?

I will always care as much as I can. I haven’t yet come to regret the policy. I don’t know if it’s good business or not. Maybe a professional would learn to distance themselves from the crying child in the heart of their customers. Maybe. But I would rather die a half-rate professional and a first-rate listener. I would rather have been a safe person for a sufferer in a hard season than an immaculate man of business.

Owen Hebbert ~ Dec, 2021