Dolly nodded, once, the nod of a measurement confirmed. "Read me the list again. All of them. Slowly."
So Dani read the twenty-three names in the empty lobby, after hours, with the rain at the glass and the kiosk asleep, and Dolly corrected her twice on pronunciations with the authority of a woman who had telephoned the schools herself to be sure, because a name said wrong at a door is a small eviction and Dolly Ferreira was not in the eviction business, not anymore, not on her watch, not with her pension. Among the names were a young woman from the welding program who had rebuilt an engine with her grandfather in a driveway all one summer; a boy from the electrical track who had been wiring Habitat houses since he was fifteen and wanted, his application said, to own the tools he was always borrowing; a returning student of thirty-one, a mother, changing trades after a decade of night shifts; and, near the end of the list, in the order the schools had sent them, an eighteen-year-old from the carpentry program at the far high school, first in his family to apply for anything with the word scholarship in it, whose counselor had written, in the margin, in pencil, the kind of note that counselors write when they want the paper to lean forward: Works mornings at a lumber yard before school. Not Briggs. A small one. Saving for tools since he was fourteen. Arrive early to everything. Dani read that name twice, the way Dolly had taught her, and put a star beside it in her own notebook, not because the star would advantage him — the committee would weigh what it weighed, and she would have struck her own star from any ledger of decision — but because the margin note rhymed with something, and she intended to be standing in the right place when the rhyme arrived.
The name, in the order the schools had sent them, was Eli Navarro.
The night before the interviews, Dani ironed her blouse and laid it over a chair, the way she had the night before the worst day of her working life, and found that the gesture had changed its meaning under her hands, the way a tool changes meaning when you finally learn the trade. Preparation as respect. She telephoned her mother in Colville and reported, in the manner of a person filing from a distant and improving front, that the binder was in a drawer, that the notebook was in her bag, that the list of names was in her head like the cast of a play she intended to honor, and that she was, for the first time since she was hired, looking forward to standing at a door.
"That's the whole of the news, most days," her mother said, "in every job I ever had. Whether you're looking forward to the door." A pause, and the kettle, faithful as a chorus. "Your grandfather," she said, "the one sent away from the dealership. He bought the newspaper the day that salesman's son took over the lot, forty years later, because the boy sent him a letter. Handwritten. Said his father had told the story at the dinner table as a warning, what it costs a business to teach its people wrong. Your grandfather framed the letter. He said a bad lesson's only good for one thing, and that's being unlearned in public, where the next generation can watch." She let that sit, the way her family let things sit, until they had done their work. "You be the unlearning, Danielle. Out loud, where they can watch."
"I intend to be," Dani said. "At nine o'clock tomorrow morning, in a lobby, with coffee."
"Then iron the blouse," her mother said, "and sleep. The door will keep till morning."
The interviews began on a Saturday morning in spring, in rain, because Spokane had apparently entered into a long-term arrangement with the weather for all occasions of consequence in this story, and because the applicants, being trades students, mostly worked weekdays, and the branch, being reformed, had opened on a Saturday for the first time in its modern history for a purpose that was not a promotion.