The Can Of Soup At The Door
I found the other one. I put it in the cart. And I forgot the first.
That is the whole crime. A can of soup in a coat pocket on a cold morning, put there by two bad hands.
So, back at the door.
Kevin’s chin was still up, but I saw something cross his face. Maybe doubt. Maybe only that he had expected me to shout or plead, and I had done neither, and now his speech had nowhere to land.
“Do you have anything to say, Mr. Haskins?” His voice was a little lower.
“No,” I said. “I expect you’ve got it figured.”
It was Patty who moved first.
She came around the end of register two with her glasses on the chain and her hands in her smock pockets, and she did not hurry. Patty is sixty-three and about five feet tall. She stopped two feet from Kevin Doolin and looked up at him.
“Kevin,” she said. “Is that Len Haskins you’ve got by the door?”
“Patty, I’m handling this.”
“I can see you’re handling it.” She did not raise her voice. Patty never does. She has a way of making a quiet voice sound like the last word on the matter. “That man has been in this store every Tuesday since before you were in the second grade. I rang up his wife’s last groceries. I have never once seen him take a toothpick.”
“The camera does not lie, Patty.”
“No, I don’t expect it does.” She looked at my hands. They were folded on the cart handle, shaking the whole cart, so that it rattled faintly on its wheels. “But I’d like to know what it’s showing you. Because I’ve watched him do the same thing every week for four years, and I’d have told you it was his hands.”
Kevin opened his mouth.
“His hands, Kevin. He’s got a tremor. You can see it from across the building. He picks up a can and sets it down three times to get it right. Last January I watched him put a jar of pickles in his coat pocket so he could get a grip on the ice by the door. He carried it out to his truck and came back in, red as a beet, and said, Patty, I think I’ve got something that doesn’t belong to me. And paid for it. Eighty-nine cents.”
I had forgotten that. I had been so embarrassed that I put it out of my mind. Patty had kept it, the way she keeps everything.
“That’s one time,” Kevin said.
“Then I’ll give you two.” That was Shirley Cobb, who had left her register to stand at Patty’s shoulder. Shirley has a laugh you can hear in the parking lot, but she was not laughing. “Two Septembers ago the machine gave him ten cents too much change. He walked back in from the parking lot in the rain to hand me a dime. I put it in the March of Dimes jar and told him he was a fool, and he said, Shirley, it isn’t mine.”