THE INTERVIEW

1: The Waiting Room

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The carpet was the same gray as the unemployment office.

Dale Kinney noticed it the way you notice a scar on someone's face—quick, unwilling, a recognition you wished you could take back. Industrial weave, flecked with colors that might once have been cheerful. The kind of carpet that existed to hide stains, to muffle footsteps, to say nothing at all.

He shifted in the chair. Vinyl, burgundy, split along the armrest where a thousand hands had gripped before his. His back had started up on the drive from Greensboro—forty minutes on I-85, the Camry's seat catching wrong against his spine—and the ibuprofen he'd dry-swallowed in the parking lot hadn't touched it yet. He tried to find an angle that didn't pinch the nerve. Gave up. Some pains you just sat with.

Two hundred forty-seven applications. Twelve interviews. Zero offers.

The numbers ran in the back of his head like a ticker, like the scroll at the bottom of a news broadcast nobody was watching. Eleven months of numbers. The balance in checking: $312.47 as of this morning, before the gas to get here. The credit card: maxed, $4,200, minimum payment due in nine days. The mortgage: fourteen days late, second notice sitting on the kitchen counter, Linda pretending not to see it every time she walked by.

Thirteen now. This was interview thirteen.

He didn't believe in luck, good or bad. Luck was what people invoked when they didn't want to look at the machinery underneath—the hires that went to the nephew, the promotions that went to the guy who golfed with the VP, the layoffs that somehow never touched the ones who laughed at the right jokes. He'd seen the machinery his whole career. Thirty-two years of watching it grind.

But thirteen.

He checked his phone. The screen was cracked from when he'd dropped it in the garage three months ago, a spiderweb fracture running from the corner across his daughter's face in the lock screen photo. Melissa at eight, gap-toothed, holding up a crayon drawing of something that might have been a horse. He should change that photo. She was twenty-nine now. Had a husband Dale had met three times, a baby he'd held twice. But he never got around to changing it, and now the crack ran right through her smile.

Twelve percent battery. No signal—strange, since he'd had three bars in the parking lot.

The waiting room was empty except for him and the receptionist behind the desk. She was young, mid-twenties maybe, with the kind of carefully neutral expression people learned to wear in places like this. She'd smiled when he walked in, said Mr. Kinney? Have a seat, she'll be with you shortly in a voice that was warm and professional and revealed nothing. Now she typed at her computer, the soft click of keys the only sound in the room besides the HVAC breathing through the vents.

He looked around. A low table held magazines he wouldn't read: Golf Digest, Forbes, a Shape from 2019 with a woman in neon spandex promising abs in six minutes a day. The walls were beige, that particular shade of nothing that existed in dentist offices and insurance agencies and HR departments. The color of waiting. A water cooler hummed in the corner. He wasn't thirsty but he thought about getting up, filling one of those little paper cones, just to have something to do with his hands.

He didn't get up.

The waiting room had no windows. He noticed this the way he'd noticed the carpet—delayed, reluctant. Four walls, the color of nothing. A door behind the reception desk, closed. The door he'd come through, also closed. No windows.

The suit was wrong. He'd bought it at Men's Wearhouse in 2019 for Melissa's wedding—charcoal gray, two-button, the salesman had called it classic in a way that meant cheap but not embarrassing. It had fit then. Fifteen pounds ago, before the eleven months ate into him, before he'd started skipping lunch because what was the point, before Linda stopped asking if he wanted seconds at dinner because she already knew the answer. The pants cinched too tight at the waist where he'd taken in the belt, and the jacket hung loose at the shoulders. He looked like a kid wearing his father's clothes.

His father had died in a suit like this. Not this suit—a brown one, older, bought sometime in the eighties when Walter Kinney still had occasion to wear such things. They'd buried him in that suit after finding him in the Walmart parking lot in Kinston, slumped against the wheel of his pickup, engine still running. Heart attack at seventy-one. Three hours east of Greensboro, down in the tobacco country where Walter had spent his whole life, and Dale had gotten the call at work and driven those three hours in a kind of blank shock, arriving too late to say anything that mattered.

The doctors said Walter was probably gone before he knew what was happening, which was supposed to be a comfort. Dale's mother had said Walter would have wanted it that way—quick, no fuss, no burden. As if dying in a parking lot was a final act of consideration.

Dale had worn the charcoal suit to the funeral too. It had fit better then.

He checked his phone again. Still twelve percent. Still no signal. The time said 8:47 AM. His interview was at nine.

A clock on the wall showed the same. Analog, institutional, the kind with a white face and black hands that belonged in a school or a hospital. The second hand ticked forward in its steady rhythm, and Dale watched it for a moment, counting the movements, grounding himself in the simple fact of time passing.

He could hear the HVAC system, a low mechanical breath cycling air that tasted recycled, that tasted like every office building he'd ever worked in. The fluorescent lights buzzed at a frequency just below hearing, more felt than heard, a vibration in the teeth.

The receptionist glanced up from her computer, caught his eye, smiled briefly. Then back to her screen. The click of keys resumed.

He straightened his tie. Navy blue, the only one he owned that didn't have a stain somewhere. Linda had picked it out years ago, for some occasion he couldn't remember. A work event, maybe. A holiday party. The kind of thing that had felt important once, back when he'd had a job to have parties for.

You've got this, Linda had said that morning, standing in the kitchen doorway while he poured coffee into the travel mug he never used anymore because there was nowhere to travel to. She'd said it the same way she'd said it before the other twelve interviews. The same way she'd said it before the first one, eleven months ago, when they'd both still believed that a man with thirty-two years of experience would have no trouble finding work. She didn't say it with the same conviction anymore. But she still said it.

He should have kissed her before he left. He'd meant to, had been moving toward her, but then he'd noticed the time and grabbed his keys instead. Habit. Thirty-one years of marriage and he still forgot to do the things that mattered when they mattered.

The door behind the reception desk opened.

"Mr. Kinney?"

The woman was tall, or held herself like she was tall—shoulders back, chin level in a way that made Dale want to straighten his own posture. She wore a blazer in a color he couldn't quite name. Not gray. Not blue. Something in between, something that seemed to shift when she moved.

"We're ready for you."

He stood. His back complained, a sharp twinge at the base of his spine, and he locked his jaw against it. Smiled. The smile he'd practiced in the bathroom mirror that morning, the one that said confident but not arrogant, eager but not desperate. He'd gotten good at that smile. Twelve interviews of practice.

"Thank you for having me," he said. "I appreciate the opportunity."

The words came out smooth, rehearsed. He'd said them so many times they'd lost whatever meaning they might once have had. They were just sounds now. The sounds you made in waiting rooms, in interview rooms, in all the rooms where you performed the version of yourself that might be good enough to deserve a paycheck.

She held the door open. Beyond it, a hallway stretched into fluorescent distance, doors on either side, all of them closed.

"Right this way, Mr. Kinney."

He walked toward her. Toward the door. His phone was still in his pocket, twelve percent battery and no signal, his daughter's cracked smile pressed against his thigh.

At the reception desk, the young woman had stopped typing. She watched him go, her expression still neutral, still professionally pleasant. But something in her posture—

He blinked, and she was typing again. Click of keys. The sound following him as he stepped through the doorway.

"It's just down here," the woman in the blazer said over her shoulder. Her heels clicked on the floor, a rhythm like a clock. "I'm Ms. Vance. I'll be conducting your interview today."

"Nice to meet you, Ms. Vance."

"Likewise, Mr. Kinney." She glanced back at him, just briefly, and her face was pleasant in a way he couldn't quite pin down—symmetrical, professional, the kind of face that would look appropriate behind any desk in any office in any building where people sat and answered questions and hoped they were enough. "I've been looking forward to this."

The hallway was longer than it had looked from the waiting room. Door after door, all of them closed, all of them unmarked. The fluorescent lights made everything flat, shadowless. The air tasted the same as the waiting room—recycled, institutional, the exhalation of a building that had been breathing the same air for decades.

Dale followed her. What else was there to do?

His back ached. His suit didn't fit. His phone had no signal and his daughter's smile was cracked and his wife had said you've got this one more time in a voice that no longer believed it.

But there was a door at the end of the hallway, and beyond that door was an interview, and beyond that interview—maybe—was a job.

Two hundred forty-seven applications. Twelve interviews. Zero offers.

This was thirteen.

He followed Ms. Vance down the hallway, toward the door at the end, and did not let himself count his steps.