How to write the AP English Literature prose fiction analysis essay

This passage was written for this course. It is from a short story set in Los Angeles in 1987. Grace, a high school senior, works after school in the dry-cleaning shop her mother owns.

By the rule of the shop, anything left more than ninety days belonged to no one. Grace's mother had lettered the rule on a card in English and Korean and taped it beside the register, where the afternoon sun had faded the English first. Twice a year the unclaimed things came down from the back rail and went into black bags for the church rummage sale: blouses with the tags of stores that had since closed, a child's First Communion dress, a tuxedo jacket whose owner had apparently gotten married, or not, without it.

Emptying the pockets was Grace's job. She liked it more than she admitted. People left pieces of themselves in their pockets: matchbooks, a folded lottery ticket, a grocery list that said only eggs, eggs, call Ray. She kept the lists in a cigar box under the counter and did not tell her mother, who would have said that other people's trash was still trash.

The navy suit had hung on the rail for two years. Its ticket was pinned to the sleeve, Delgado, 2 pc, press only, with a date in 1985 in her mother's square hand. Grace had just found a folded paper in the inside pocket when the bell over the door rang.

The man who came in was older than her father would have been. He stopped just inside the door, as if the shop were a church he had not been raised in, and held out a pink claim ticket so worn that it had gone soft as cloth.

"I know it's late," he said.

Her mother came from the back with steam still rising from her forearms. She looked at the ticket, then at the card by the register, then at the man. Grace had watched her turn away customers who were three days late. She had watched her refuse a woman in a fur coat who cried. "Ninety days," her mother would say, and point at the card, as though the card had made the decision and she was only reading it aloud.

"It was my brother's," the man said. "He brought it in for my daughter's wedding. Then he didn't need it." He stopped. "I kept the ticket in my wallet. I don't know why I kept it."

Grace waited for the card. Her mother did not look at it. She went to the back rail, lifted down the navy suit, and brushed the shoulders with the flat of her hand, twice, though there was no dust on them. She did not charge him for the storage. She did not charge him anything. When he took out his wallet she folded his hand shut around it, the way you close a child's fingers over a coin so it won't be lost.

Grace held out the paper from the pocket. "This was in the jacket." He unfolded it and read it, and something happened in his face that was almost a laugh. Shoes. Blue tie? Toast: keep it short. "He never kept anything short," the man said, and he put the paper into his wallet, in the place where the ticket had been.

After he had gone, her mother went to the register and straightened the card, which was not crooked, and pressed the tape flat at each corner with her thumb. Grace started to say something. "Ninety days," her mother said, without turning around, and went back to the steam.