The Can Of Soup At The Door

“Sir, I need you to empty your coat pockets. Right here.”

Kevin Doolin said it loud enough to carry. I was three steps past the registers with my sacks in the cart, headed for the automatic door, and he stepped in front of the cart like a man stopping a car. Behind him the checkout lanes had gone quiet. There were six people in the nearest line, and every one of them turned around.

“Kevin,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

“You know what the trouble is, Mr. Haskins.”

I did not. My hands were shaking, but my hands are always shaking, and I took that for the only trouble in the room.

He put two fingers on the right pocket of my tan jacket, the one that sags from thirty years of carrying my pocketknife and my glasses case. Something in it was heavier than it should have been. I put my own hand in, slowly, and my fingers closed around something cold and round.

I pulled out a can of chicken noodle soup.

I stood there holding it. The shelf tag back on aisle 6 had said ten cans for ten dollars. I looked at that can the way you look at a snake you have just picked up thinking it was a rope.

“I have been watching you on the camera since you came in,” Kevin said. He had his chin up and his voice pitched for the line. “I saw you put it in your coat on aisle 6. I saw you walk past all four registers with it. I have the district manager in my back office this morning going over my numbers, and we have lost $2,300 in product this quarter, and I am done. You are not going to walk out of my store with a can of soup you did not pay for. And you are not going to walk back in, either. You are banned. For life. If I see you in this building again I will call the sheriff’s office and have you charged with trespass.”

Somebody in the line said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

My face burned. Not warm. Burned, from my collar to the tips of my ears, the way it did in the eighth grade when Mr. Danforth read my spelling test aloud. I am 71 years old. I have buried a wife and a brother and a good dog. And I stood by an automatic door with a can of soup in my fist, and I wanted the floor to take me.

I did not argue. I looked at the can. I looked at Kevin, who is twenty-nine, with a wife and a four-month-old baby and a store vest with his name stitched on it. And I said, in the voice I used on the county road crew when a gravel hauler wanted to tell me the bridge posting did not apply to him:

“All right, Kevin.”