The Bagger They Called Not Fit

“Did he say why,” I asked. “Did he give you a reason, other than that.”

“He said the new scanners are faster if customers bag their own,” Bradley said. “He said corporate wants fewer hours on the baggers.”

He had already said the not personal part twice. I understood, sitting there, that he was repeating it to himself more than to me, the way you repeat the thing someone told you when you are trying to make sense of it, even when some part of you already knows it does not add up.

I want to tell you what that job meant to my son, because if you have never watched someone build a whole daily purpose out of four hours a shift bagging groceries, you might think I am making more of this than it was. I am not.

Bradley started at Lindell’s the September he turned eighteen, through a job coach program the high school ran with three stores in the county. He was the only one of the four kids in that program who stayed past the first year. The other three moved on or moved away or the placements did not take. Bradley stayed because, from his first week, he was good at it, and because Verlene Tolliver, who had run that register for twenty six years and who did not suffer fools of any age, decided within a month that he was hers to train right.

“He’s better than half the kids I’ve broken in,” Verlene told me once, maybe a year in, standing in the parking lot while Bradley loaded somebody’s truck. “He double bags the eggs without being told. He remembers who’s got the bad hip and needs their stuff light. He says good morning to every single person who walks in that door and he means it.”

That last part is the thing people in Henning will tell you about my son if you ask them, and strangers used to ask me, in the Casey’s or at church, had I heard that the Dunlap boy down at Lindell’s remembered everybody’s name. He kept a system. He told me about it once, proud as anything: regulars who come on Mondays, regulars who come on Fridays, regulars who always buy the same brand of coffee, and he matched the name to the face to the day of the week until the whole town was sorted in his head like a card catalog nobody else could see.

Delbert Lindgren was near the top of that card catalog. Delbert was seventy eight, a widower three years running, and he had worked out that Bradley’s days were Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so those were the days he shopped, two cans of soup and a loaf of bread and the newspaper, though he could have bought them any morning of the week. He told me once, without any embarrassment at all, “That boy is the best part of my morning, and I don’t get too many of those anymore.”

Bradley bagged Delbert’s soup and bread and newspaper three days a week for four years. He asked after Delbert’s knee. He asked whether Delbert’s grandson had called from Fort Campbell that week. On the anniversary of the day Delbert’s wife died, which Bradley had worked out on his own from something said at a register one afternoon, he said, quiet, just between the two of them, “I remember her too, Mr. Lindgren,” and Delbert told me later it was the only time all year anybody said that to him.