The Bagger They Called Not Fit

I watched a man in a seed cap, somebody I did not know, stop at the end of aisle six, look at the front end for a long minute, and put his basket down on a shelf and walk out. That was the only abandoned basket I saw all week, and I have heard since that it was the same man who had been coming in every Wednesday for years because of the young man who asked him about his dog.

Mostly it was the asking. Over and over, all afternoon, at the register and at the service desk and in the aisles, people stopped Verlene to ask where Bradley was. And Verlene, who had never been in her life a woman who said more than she had to, told every one of them the truth in the same level voice. “He got let go on Friday. The new manager said he wasn’t a good fit.”

I saw a few of them nod and go to the checkout anyway. I saw a few of them put down what they were carrying and leave. The rest of them just stood there a minute, looking at the empty spot by the window, and then they went and did something I think was more important than either of those, which was go find Gene Boughton.

Gene Boughton had been standing by the front doors, Verlene told me later, for most of that afternoon, because the traffic numbers that pinged his tablet every hour were showing him something that made no sense to him: foot traffic steady, register transactions sliding, a line of customers who wanted a word. Nobody was shouting at him. Nobody was making a scene. They were simply, quietly, asking him one at a time, and declining to spend their money, one person at a time, all day long.

It was Delbert Lindgren who finally told him why, standing at the service desk with his cane planted in front of him like a flagpole.

“You want to know what’s wrong with your week,” Delbert said, loud enough, Verlene told me, that half the front end heard it. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your week. You fired the only reason half this town bothered coming in here instead of driving up the highway. You thought you were cutting a few hours off a payroll. You were cutting the whole reason we came.”

“Sir, I understand you’re upset,” Boughton started, and Delbert cut him off.

“I am not upset,” Delbert said. “I am seventy eight years old and I have outlived upset. I am telling you a fact. You have worked here eleven weeks and you do not know one customer’s name. That boy knew all of them. Do the arithmetic on which of you this store needs.”

I was not there for that exchange. Verlene told it to me twice, once that evening on the phone and once in person a week later, and both times she told it the same way, word for word, which tells me it is close to true.