The Can Of Soup At The Door
I moved the cart out of the doorway so I was not blocking anybody. Then I took everything out of my pockets and set it on the cart rail in a row, where the line could see it. Pocketknife. Glasses case. Truck keys. A folded envelope, which I kept in my shirt pocket and did not take out. The can of soup at the end.
“That’s all of it,” I said.
Then I folded my hands on the cart handle to hold them still, and I stood there.
I did not leave. I did not explain. I said nothing about the tremor or the list or the 38 years. I looked down the line of registers at the women who had been ringing up my groceries since before Kevin Doolin could drive.
And I waited.
I have lived in Dunmore, Missouri, since 1987. I came at 33 with a wife who was expecting and a job offer from the county highway department, running a road grader and then, as the years went on, running the crew that ran the grader. The first thing Mildred did when we got to town was ask where people bought their groceries. The man at the gas station said Rennick’s. Eleven aisles under a flat roof, a hand-lettered sign in the window about sweet corn, and a woman at register two who told Mildred her baby was going to be a big one, going by how she carried.
She was right. Darrell was nine pounds, four ounces.
That store has been the center of my week for 38 years. The Rennick family sold it to a chain out of Springfield nine years ago, and now a computer sets the prices and a district office sends down numbers. But the people who matter in that building did not change.
Patty Rosen has been at register two since 1999. Shirley Cobb took register four in 2008. Clifford Clemens has cut meat at the back counter for 44 years; he was hired the last winter Carter was in the White House, and he will tell you the exact date if you stand still. They knew Mildred’s maiden name. They knew when Darrell left for the Navy and when he came home. When Mildred was sick, Patty started setting aside the soft white bread Mildred could still keep down, in a sack under her counter with my name on it in marker. Nobody asked her to. She never mentioned it. I walked up one Tuesday and there it was.
The county job was twenty-two miles of gravel and a bridge crew of four, and what it taught me was to be sure before I put a barricade across anybody’s road, because people take a closed road personally. I retired the spring I turned 65. By then the only thing I was sure of was where my wife would be at five o’clock.
Mildred died 14 months ago, in September. After that I could not stand the kitchen. Not the house, the kitchen: the cupboards with her handwriting on the shelf paper, the pencil jar. So I took over the shopping the way she used to do it, early on Tuesdays, when the store is quiet and the produce is fresh and the people there say my name.