The Can Of Soup At The Door
“Mr. Haskins, what I saw on that clip was a man slide a can into his pocket in plain view of the aisle camera, look at it for a second like he wasn’t sure what it was, and then stand in line at register two for four minutes talking with a cashier with the lump still showing in his coat. I have been looking at shoplifters for twenty years. They do not stand in line for four minutes.” She turned her head. “Mr. Doolin, you ran that clip at normal speed once and saw what you were afraid of. I would like you to run it again, later, and watch his face.”
Kevin said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“I want to hear it from you anyway,” she said to me. “What happened with that can?”
This is where my son Darrell, to this day, shakes his head. He says, Dad, you could have said it all in 30 seconds.
And he is right. I could have said, my hands, my wife’s list, check the receipt. But I knew something standing there with my face on fire. If I argued, I became an old man arguing with a manager. That was all anyone would see. Half the line would have thought, well, the boy has to protect his store, and nobody would have been wrong to think it. But if I stood still, then the people who had watched me for 38 years could tell her who I was, and she would have more than my word to go on. I did not want to be believed because I shouted. I wanted to be believed because I was known.
Now she had asked me straight, and I answered her straight.
“I set it in my pocket on aisle 6, ma’am. I did it to steady the cart. My hands were bad from the cold and I’d gone back for my pill. I forgot the can. I’d have found it at home and brought it in Tuesday, and I don’t expect you to take my word for that, but I expect you’ve heard some others.”
“I have,” she said, and she almost smiled. “Quite a few.”
“Is there anything else anyone wants me to know?” Candace Calloway asked, to the front of the store in general. She did not say it like a speech.
Clifford Clemens came out from behind the meat counter, wiping his hands on his apron. Clifford is sixty-eight. He wears a white paper hat and has never in his life said more than six words in a row to a manager. He walked up and stood beside me with his arms crossed.
“I’ll say one thing,” Clifford said. “The week Len’s wife was in the hospital, he came in and bought one can of soup because it was all she could keep down. I cut him a half-pound of ham to go with it. He tried to pay me and I wouldn’t take it, so he put it back in the case and said he’d come back for it when he could carry it right. The next Tuesday he came back and paid for it, to the penny. I put it in the register myself.” He looked at Kevin. “I’d have done the same for you.”