The Can Of Soup At The Door
Mason Pike came up beside me then, with a bagging apron over his school sweatshirt and a look like he had been holding his breath for a quarter of an hour.
“I’ll take your sacks out, Mr. Haskins.”
“Mason, I haven’t paid for the rest of them yet. They went through before all this.”
“They did,” Patty said from register two, without turning her head. “I rang them up myself at ten after seven. You’re paid up, Len. Everything but the one can.”
So the cart had been fine the whole time. It was only the pocket that was wrong. Mason pushed the cart out through the automatic doors and across the lot to my truck, and I walked beside him, and neither of us said anything. He loaded the sacks in the cab one at a time, the milk upright and the eggs on top. When he shut the door, he stood a second with his hand flat on the roof of the cab.
“I’d have said something,” he said. “If I’d been closer.”
“You were bagging, son.”
“Yes, sir.” He looked at the store. “I’m still going to say it next time.”
I drove home and set Hazel’s can on her porch, rang the bell, and went back to my own kitchen, where I sat for most of an hour with the radio off.
I did not hear what was said in the office. Patty told me the result on Thursday, and Patty has never told me a thing that was not so.
Kevin was not fired. He was told he would be off the Dunmore floor at the end of the month and moved to the chain’s store in Moberly as an assistant, a step down from where he was, at the same hourly pay for the first six months. A woman from Hannibal would be coming to run Rennick’s. The following week a memo went out to every store in the district, two paragraphs long: no one is to be stopped at a door on camera evidence alone, and a manager who sees a possible theft on the monitor is to go to the floor, follow the customer through the transaction, and speak to him in private with a second employee present.
Nobody named anything after me. I’d have objected if they had.
As for the numbers that had been scaring Kevin, they turned out to be a man from out of town with a van and a way with the back door. The sheriff’s office picked him up in November. Kevin never knew. By then he was in Moberly.