Chapter 15: Aisle Six
The Foodway on Route 6 is open until eleven and the bus stops at the far end of the lot.
I went on a Thursday after work with eleven dollars and forty cents and a list of four things.
Bread. Peanut butter. Bananas. A can of soup.
I carried a basket instead of taking a cart, because a cart makes you buy at the rate of a cart.
That is not thrift. That is a rule, and I had a great many rules by June.
I was doing the arithmetic in my head at the bread, the way I did all that year.
Two forty-nine plus three nineteen is five sixty-eight.
Then bananas by weight.
Weighed produce is the only thing in a grocery store you cannot price exactly until the register, and I hated it for four straight months.
I came around the end of aisle five and looked up the length of aisle six.
She was at the far end, at the cereal, with a cart.
Camel coat gone, because it was June.
A striped shirt. Sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
She was turning a box over to read the back of it.
Twenty-two feet, maybe twenty-five. I have never measured it and I will not pretend I did.
I saw her left hand on the box.
The bangle was on the wrist above it.
It had slid down and caught, the way it does, because it was sized for a woman with a wider wrist than either of us.
I stood at the end of aisle six with a plastic basket in my right hand.
I am going to write down exactly what went through my head, in order, because I have had a long time to be honest about it.
The first thing was not the bangle.
The first thing was: she buys the brand my mother bought.
The second thing was the bangle.
The third thing was a number, and the number was six.
Six weeks of hearings if somebody files. Six years I already did.
Six days between my first paycheck and Ivy's next envelope.
The fourth thing was a sentence in Kandace Pruitt's voice, flat, from a chair with a metal arm.
You'd go back. That's what would happen.
What stopped me was not forgiveness.
It was not fear either, and I have been offered both of those since by people being kind.
It was arithmetic.
If I walked up that aisle, the best available outcome was that I said something true to a woman holding a cereal box, and the worst available outcome was a hearing.
And on the other side of that hearing there was no scanner, no twenty-eight hours, no forty-dollar records request I had not even made yet.
She had already taken six years off me. The number I was protecting was the rest.
So I turned around.
I put the basket down on the end cap by the sale display, with eight dollars and change of food in it.
Then I walked to the front of the store and out through the automatic door.
That was a bad trade and I made it on purpose.
I ate crackers out of the Bertrand kitchen that night and told Yolanda the bus was early.
Outside it was still light. The lot was about half full.
Third row, near the cart return, was my car.
Dark blue. The dent in the rear quarter panel, unrepaired, still there in the third year of somebody else driving it.
And on the rear window, bottom left, the parking sticker, faded from red almost to pink, with half a year still legible on it.
I stood next to a shopping cart corral and looked at it for a while.
There is a version of that evening where I do something to that car. There are several versions. I had six years to design them.
I did nothing to it.
I did put my hand flat on the rear window, over the sticker, for about two seconds.
Not to leave a mark. There was no mark. It was warm from the sun and that is all it was.
Then I took my hand off and walked across the lot to the bus stop and stood there with nothing in either hand.
The bus came at 6:51, four minutes late, which on that route counts as early.
I sat on the left side, behind the rear door.
Twenty-two minutes to Anselm Street.
I did not count anything on that ride, which was unusual, and I noticed that I was not counting, and then I counted the stops to have something to do.
I have wondered since whether she saw me at the end of that aisle.
I have gone back and forth on it for years, and I have landed, finally, on yes.
She saw me. She turned the box back over and read the back of it again and let me leave.