BOBBY STANKIEWICZ GREW UP in a hardware store. Not metaphorically — literally in a hardware store, his father’s auto parts shop on the main street of Krakow, Wisconsin, which is a town you may not have heard of and which Bobby describes as “smaller than this one, which is saying something.” He was behind the counter doing homework from the age of nine. He learned the part numbers before he learned long division. He learned, by the time he was fourteen, a specific skill that he did not yet have a name for but that his father could identify: listening.

“My dad was very good at listening to what the car needed,” he said, over coffee at the diner counter Thursday morning. “Not just what the customer said the car needed. What the car needed. Because the customer would come in and say, ‘it makes a noise,’ and my dad would say, ‘what kind of noise,’ and the customer would try to describe it, and halfway through the description my dad already knew. He already knew what was wrong and what it needed. He listened to what was being said and also to what wasn’t being said, and between the two of them he found the answer.”

He finished his coffee. Ordered a second. Continued.

“That’s what fitting is,” he said. “A client comes in. They tell you what they want. You listen to what they want. You also listen to how they describe what they want, which tells you things about how they think and what they actually need, which is sometimes the same as what they want and sometimes not. And then you calibrate the model to bridge the gap. The model does the work. My job is to understand the person well enough to know what the model needs to know in order to do that work.”

He has been in this town since July, which makes him one of the original arrivals: the advance wave of factory workers who came early to set up, train, and be ready for the September opening. He moved his grandmother here with him, he explains, because she was seventy-five years old, didn’t drive, and had been living alone in Pulaski since his grandfather died, and because when he described the town to her, she had said, after a pause, “That sounds like a place I would like.”

“She said that about very few places,” Bobby said. “She was not a woman who said things like that easily. So I believed her.”

“In the parts store, you learned something about every car that came in. The car told you things. The customer told you things. You put it together and you found the right part. Here: the client tells you things. The model tells you things. You put it together and you find the right fit.”

Bobby Stankiewicz, Model Fitter

Agnes Marie Rybicki died two days ago, on Tuesday, September 9, at her home on Lakeview Drive. She had been in the town for six weeks. She had approved of the cheese selection at the Piggly Wiggly. She had, in those six weeks, made several friends on Lakeview Drive through the specific medium of a bird feeder she had mounted on the windowsill, which had attracted first birds, then neighbors who came to ask about the birds, and then relationships that were brief but appeared, from the obituary in this morning’s paper, to have been genuine.

Bobby speaks about her with the particular composure of a person who has been grieving for two days and has decided that the work, which starts today, is what she would have wanted him to focus on.

“She saw the factory,” he said. “I took her past it two weeks ago. She looked at it for a while and she said, ‘That’s a serious building,’ which is the highest compliment she gave to things. Buildings, people, food. ‘That’s serious.’ She meant it as a good thing. She thought serious things were the important things.”

He has been in training since late July, learning the fitting protocols, the calibration methods, the language the model uses to describe its own state — which Bobby describes as “honest in a way that takes some getting used to” — and the interview techniques that allow a fitter to understand a client well enough to begin the calibration process. The training has, he says, confirmed something he already suspected from the parts store: the technology is not the hard part. The hard part is the person.

“The model is very good at a lot of things,” he said. “But it starts from zero with a new client. My job is to make sure it doesn’t have to stay at zero for very long. The better I understand the person, the faster the model can stop guessing and start helping.”

He has twelve clients scheduled for his first week. He has reviewed each of their intake forms. He has prepared, for each of them, a short list of questions he wants to ask in the first five minutes of the fitting session, based on what the intake form tells him about what the intake form is not saying. This is, he notes without apparent self-consciousness, something his father taught him about listening at the counter in Krakow.

“The form tells you what they want you to know,” he said. “The first five minutes tells you the rest.”

His shift starts at 8 a.m. He finished his second coffee. He left a generous tip. He said, on the way out: “My grandmother would have liked this diner. The booths are the right height.”

He did not elaborate on what the right height was. This reporter decided not to ask. Some things are complete when they’re said.

Coffee Hour (Carol Hafner) sits down with one person in this town every week to find out what they’re about. Nominations: [email protected]. This week’s coffee was paid for by the Tribune. The tip was Bobby’s own.