The Can Of Soup At The Door
One of the women from my church told me afterward that Kevin ought to have been let go. I understand why. It cost me something that morning that I do not think I’ll get back, the plain ease of walking into a place I loved without being looked at. But I have been the young man with the baby and the bad numbers, and a man who owed me nothing once gave me the benefit of an afternoon. I would rather it was a step down than a door shut. That is Candace Calloway’s business, and Kevin’s. It was not mine to decide.
I have been wrong in public myself. In 1994 I closed the Leland Creek bridge on a Friday afternoon over a crack a neighbor had called in, with the whole church supper crowd stuck on the wrong side of it and the casseroles going cold in their cars. It was the wrong bridge. The cracked one was a mile north. I stood at that barricade and took it for an hour from people I had known for seven years, and not one of them said I was a fool, which was worse. I carried it three summers. So I did not hold Kevin to a harder standard than the one I got.
The following Tuesday I did not know if I would go.
I woke at four, the way I do, and sat in the kitchen with the envelope in front of me. I thought, I could drive over to the Casey’s in the next town and shop where nobody knows my name. Then I thought of the bread in its marker-lettered sack and Clifford’s paper hat, and I put my jacket on.
It was 6:50 in the morning and the sun was just coming up gray over the feed store across the road. The lot was nearly empty. When I got out of the truck my hands were going so hard I dropped my keys in a puddle by the cart corral.
A boy bent down and got them before I could. Mason Pike, sixteen. He bags groceries after school and on Saturdays, and he walks me to my truck every Tuesday and sets the sacks in the cab, and he has done it without being asked since the day after Mildred’s funeral, when he saw me trying to lift a gallon of milk and the jug shook right out of my hand. He has never taken a tip. I tried. He said, Mr. Haskins, my grandpa had that, and I’d want somebody to help him.
He wiped my keys on his sleeve and handed them back.
“Morning, Mr. Haskins.”
“Morning, Mason.”
The automatic doors opened with their little whoosh. Patty was at register two with the lights on over her head. She looked up and saw me and did not make a fuss. She simply said, “Morning, Len,” in the voice she has said it for twenty-six years.
I almost could not answer her.
Kevin was in produce, straightening the apples with his back to me. He went still when the doors opened. Then he turned around, and he did not come toward me. He waited, with his hands at his sides, and I walked across the store and stopped in front of him.
“Kevin.”