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An establishment in Harmon
He gave him a nickel and put the nickel in David’s hand, not on the counter, the small Main-Street courtesy of a man who had been doing this his whole life and that Bill had taught him before Brian was old enough to count change.
— The Good Father
Reilly’s Sporting Goods is the cleats-and-basketball-shoes store on Main Street, founded in 1957 by Patrick Reilly. The bell over the door, the long oak counter, and the bin of canvas work gloves are all original. Patrick’s son Bill ran it next; when Bill died in 2005, the keys passed to Bill’s son Brian, the quieter Reilly, who has been ringing up shoes ever since. Three generations behind the same register. Brian knows the local kids’ sizes the way other shopkeepers know their regulars’ orders.
In The Good Father, the store is a small portrait of the Main Street economy the series keeps mourning. David Marsh buys his son Cooper a pair of high-tops the morning of a Saturday game; Brian rings them without comment, takes four twenties and a five, and puts the nickel of change in David’s hand, not on the counter, the courtesy his father Bill taught him before he could count. “Tell Cooper good luck Saturday,” Brian says. It is the kind of transaction the big-box stores on the bypass cannot sell.
Brian is the eldest of three Reilly brothers. He keeps the store; his younger brother Kevin runs Reilly Property Group; and the youngest, Dennis, is the county assessor at the heart of The Loyal Man. When Dennis needs basketball shoes for his son, it is his brother Brian’s counter he stands at. The quietest of the three, Brian is the one who sees what the others are carrying and never says so.