The September Denim Jacket

The denim jacket hangs on the back-hall hook all summer, and in September I take it down. It is medium blue, not the stiff dark kind and not the washed-out stone color. The denim is hard at the shoulders, soft at the elbows, and the cuffs are frayed from folding them back twice. A thin white line crosses the back yoke where the jacket stayed folded on the closet shelf from May to September. The brass button on the left cuff has gone dull, and the center button is cracked halfway through.

In September the jacket goes where I go. In the first half of the month it is too warm at two in the afternoon, and I carry it over one arm, the collar bunched against the inside of my elbow. It is right at seven in the morning, when the sidewalk is still in the shadow of the house. It is right again at the Friday night football game. I sit on the aluminum bleacher with the collar turned up against the breeze off the field, and the denim behind my neck is warm from my own heat. The collar stays where I set it. The man in the row ahead leans back, and the collar touches the back of his head; neither of us moves.

The jacket has one job in September, which is to hold things in its pockets. The right front pocket has a blue shop rag from the day I fixed the fence gate. The left chest pocket, the one I reach for when I cross a parking lot, has a folded ticket at the bottom of it. The pocket is creased from years of folding paper in half to make it fit. When I reach in for a pencil, I bring out a gas receipt that is not mine, a staple, and a little pile of red dust from the gravel lot. I put them back. The pocket keeps them.

The jacket's color was made by September light. The shoulders are pale where the sun came through the windshield on early-evening drives. The cuffs are worn where they rested on the armrest. The collar has a crease across the fold from being turned up, and the denim there is lighter on one side. The center button, cracked halfway through, does its job; the two sides of the jacket meet at it, and the crack has not grown since last year.

At the end of the night I take the jacket off and hang it on the back-hall hook. The sleeves are stiff where I kept them folded on my lap on the bleachers. The left chest pocket has the shape of a ticket pressed into the denim from the outside. The collar stands up in the line I turned it against the wind, with a ridge folded into the cloth that does not flatten when I press it.