The Can Of Soup At The Door
Kevin looked from one of them to the other. The man in the seed cap at the head of the line studied his own cart. The young mother behind him shifted her toddler to the other hip.
“You don’t understand,” Kevin said. He was talking to Patty, but he said it to the whole front of the store. “I’ve been told to stop it. Shrink at this store is running near three times the district average. Canned meat, formula, cold medicine. I was told two weeks ago if it doesn’t come down by the end of the quarter, I’m the one who gets written up. I saw it on the screen. He put it in his pocket.”
“He did,” Patty said. “I’m sure he did. And did you watch him past that?”
“What?”
“He’s still standing in the building, Kevin. He’s got it sitting out on his cart where four of us can see it. Did you give him one minute to find it himself?”
Kevin said nothing.
“And he buys two cans of that soup every Tuesday,” Patty said. “One of them goes to Hazel Beck on Birch Street. Ask Clifford. Ask anybody back of the building who has ever seen him leave a sack on her porch.”
I said, “Patty.”
“You hush, Len.”
I wanted to say something. I had spent a long time with nobody saying my name kindly except on Tuesdays, and now two women were saying it at once in front of strangers, and I did not know where to put my face. So I looked at the floor tile. There is a kind of kindness that is harder to take than an insult.
That was when the door to the back office opened.
The woman who came out was tall, about fifty, neat, with gray coming into her hair and a navy suit that did not belong in a Dunmore grocery. She stood with one hand on the doorframe for a moment, the way you do when you have been listening for a while and have decided to stop.
“Mr. Doolin,” she said. “A word. Right here, please.”
Kevin turned. He had the look of a man who has just seen his own report card.
“Ms. Calloway, I was about to bring this to you. There was a theft. I identified the customer on the video.”
“I saw the video,” she said. “I have the same monitor you do. I watched it twice.” She walked past him to me. Up close she was kinder than I expected, and tired. “Sir, I am Candace Calloway, the district manager. May I ask your name?”
“Leonard Haskins,” I said. “Len.”