Most days, I never would have walked to the convenience store half a mile down the street to get cigarettes and a cup of the lousy coffee they served there. But for some reason, the familiarity of my irritation at being out of smokes and coffee gave me just the boost of spirit necessary to make the trip. There was a speck of reassurance feeling that small but persistent emotion from the terrible Before, even as I felt a corresponding plunge of deeper despair at the thought of Kate’s death being merely now a milestone of my life, because my life continued while hers had been canceled. It was just a matter of grammar on one level, I realized, but it still felt selfish and awful and disloyal.
I meant to splash cold water on my face and rake my wet hands through my hair and go. But the person I saw in the mirror looked ravaged and haunted and underfed. In the instant before I equated myself with the reflection, I thought, Look at how helpless that guy looks. I thought, That’s the look of real grief, and my face changed to a frown as it looked at itself.
I stared at my reflection and said, “You’re a wonder, Charlie Crosby; it’s a wonder you don’t fall apart.”
There was a lozenge of soap in the gritty bottom of the bathtub near the drain. I scraped it up and rubbed it between my palms under the running water in the sink until it lathered and scrubbed my face and rinsed it. My hair was filthy but I felt revulsion at the idea of taking a full shower, something I had not done, I realized, since before the New Year. The idea of immersing myself in hot water and cleaning myself off made me feel as if I’d come out raw and vulnerable and exposed, like some animal that properly lives up to its eyes in mud for protection. I did strip off my four layers of shirts, though, all at once, and scrub myself with a wet washcloth and swab on some of Kate’s old deodorant because I smelled foul. Almost miraculously, there were a couple of clean old shirts in the bottom drawer of my bureau, articles I’d told Susan not long before Kate died that she could give to charity.
My worries about feeling like an animal coming out of its hiding place were confirmed when I stepped outside and the sunlight felt as if it were scalding my eyes. I wanted to turn and scurry back into the darkness of the house, but my cravings for tobacco and caffeine compelled me.
The convenience store was called Red Orchard. It was one of the last two or three dingy franchises left from what had once been a near monopoly around the North Shore. When I was a kid, there had been a Red Orchard about the same distance from my mother’s house as there was now from my own, and as I walked I thought about being sent there by my mother for a gallon of milk or by our neighbor Dolores—Dolly—for cigarettes when she and my mother got together on summer afternoons to gossip and play a dice game called Yahtzee. Most of the short walk, which couldn’t have been longer than a third of a mile but seemed much longer when I was young, took me past a stretch of Enon Swamp that had remained undeveloped even after World War II, a few dozen acres of lowland that flooded in the spring and gave way to skunk cabbage and smelly mud in the summer. For me the trip was always fraught with perils. Milk used to come in glass bottles and I dropped a half gallon once on the sidewalk and the bottle shattered and I ran home, terrified. Since the road we lived on was fairly busy, dead animals regularly materialized spraddled out against the curb—a raccoon or gopher or someone’s cat. The bodies were usually intact except for some single, horrifying detail, like a green, vermiform length of intestine trailing out from under a woodchuck, or a tabby with its hind legs twisted backward, or maggots devouring a possum’s eyes. My mother and Dolly told me horror stories, too, in order to frighten me into being conscientious near the road, about the Litchfield boy who jumped into the street after the basketball he’d been dribbling and got run over by one of Keener’s oil trucks, or Kimmy Leach, who pirouetted right into Mrs. Abbot’s Nash Metropolitan, which the widow never drove faster than twenty miles an hour, but that just meant it took Kimmy three agonizing weeks in the hospital to finally die. In between the nerve-racking odysseys to and from, though, there was the store itself, stacked with soda and stuffed with candy and comic books. Comic books were an unthinkable luxury, but when I was sent for milk or bread or Dolly’s cigarettes, which were called Pall Malls and came in red packages and had no filters, and which I bought three packs at a time, Dolly’s daily ration, I was given fifteen cents to buy a candy bar or a bottle of store-brand soda. The soda was a source of great frustration because it came in dozens of flavors, all of different, bright, alluring colors. I wanted so much for the soda to taste like what I imagined the colors should, but it never did, and I ended up nearly in tears so many times over, for example, how lousy the beautiful, almost fluorescent green soda, called Key Lime Rickey, tasted that my mother finally forbade me to buy any more.
When I reached where the sidewalk met the Red Orchard parking lot, I wanted to turn and flee again. Instead, I walked along the back perimeter of the lot. Half of the low, one-story building was a vacant storefront where over the years a succession of ill-planned businesses had come and gone: a store that sold nothing but soccer equipment, a haberdashery, a frumpy dress shop. When a barbershop had looked for a time as if it might thrive, the landlord had expanded the parking from its original half dozen spaces to twenty, where the men of Enon would park their cars every Saturday morning in order to get their weekly trims. The barbershop closed a year after the new lot had been completed (the owner, an ex-marine, only knew how to give flattops) and the space had been used since by the DPW trucks during snow-plowing breaks and the police for speed traps. I walked toward the back of the lot, along the border between the pavement and the weeds that were matted down and half buried in the road gravel that had melted out of the snowbanks over the winter, resisting the temptation to dive for cover beyond the verge, trying to appear as if I were studying some bit of botany. (I imagined seeing myself from a car pulling into the lot, a scarecrow of a man hunched over the twigs, scratching his chin and nodding expertly to himself about some soggy mirage of his own madness.) As it happened, I did see the pale tips of crocus buds rising from the mulch.
I walked along the side of the store and when I reached the front corner I peered around it. There was only one car in the lot, a big, expensive European sedan, empty and idling, straddling two spaces. I waited until the car pulled away and walked across to the storefront, deliberately avoiding looking at my reflection in the glass, pushed the swinging door, and went inside.
The interior was much dingier than I remembered. The fluorescent lighting was dim and fluttery and buzzed, the floor worn and scuffed. An old card table with two folding chairs was set up in a corner, facing a television set screwed into brackets set high up on the wall. Sets of random numbers flashed on the television screen. A plastic stand with paper forms and half a dozen stubby pencils had been placed on the center of the table. A couple of bright green lottery scratch tickets had been left in front of one of the seats, next to an empty coffee cup. The racks around the store seemed half empty, and the boxes and cans all looked like they’d been there for years, like they were props used to stage the appearance of a convenience store rather than real goods someone might actually buy. The magazine rack and wire carousel for comic books were empty except for what looked like real estate brochures and menus from pizza places. The store smelled stale and papery, but it was clean. There was no dust anywhere and the worn floor was well swept. I figured the store must do most of its business selling lottery tickets and coffee and newspapers, which were piled up in front of the cashier’s island, and maybe still cigarettes, although no one seemed to smoke anymore. Six coffee carafe pumps were set on a counter perpendicular to the cashier’s island, along with stacks of different-sized cups and lids and bins of sugar and artificial sweeteners and plastic thimbles of cream and milk.
The man at the cash register looked like he might be from India or Pakistan or somewhere on the subcontinent, as I thought of it. He was my age, I supposed, and had short, straight hair and a thick mustache. He wore old gray pants and a tan sweater vest over a p
laid shirt. I smiled and nodded at him, and halfway said hi to him, but it sounded more like “Huh” or “Ha.” He didn’t smile back but nodded at me once, not unfriendly, just serious. I didn’t want to dither, because I knew I looked sketchy. I had never bought my coffee or my cigarettes here and although I was a native of Enon, to this man I was a stranger who could have been from anywhere. I figured I’d buy three or four of the largest coffees they had, black, and take them back to the house and keep them in the refrigerator and heat them up in a saucepan each morning. I looked at the cashier again and smiled.
“I drew the short straw, man,” I said, surprising myself by the lie. A sudden, made-up story sprang into my mind, of me being on a painting crew and somehow having lost some kind of bet to determine who had to fetch and pay for coffee before work. I could even see the guys I was working with, and imagine the cramped pickup truck cab we were all stuffed into, bleary, smoking, irritable, one or two of the guys already draining nips of vodka and tossing the little plastic bottles out the window into people’s front yards.
“I’m the sap who has to get the joe today. And pay for it,” I said. The man at the register did not change his serious expression.
“Yes,” he said. I lifted a twenty-four-ounce coffee cup from the top of the stack.
“This the largest size?” I asked. “These guys are coffee freaks.”
“Yes,” the man said. The urge to fling the cup and run out of the store seized me, and the cup did skitter out of my hand, across the counter, and drop onto the floor. I stooped to pick it up and dizziness swept through my head. I was suddenly mortified by the fact that I had not spoken to another person for nearly a month, and that I was high and drunk every waking moment, and that I was so discombobulated all the time that what I considered to be my relatively clearheaded state at the moment might seem to any normal person the brink of a coma. I grabbed the edge of the counter and took a breath and pulled myself up.
“Mondays, man,” I said to the man at the register. He frowned and stepped down off the cashier’s island and came toward me. I was placing the cup I’d dropped on the floor under one of the carafes. As the man took the cup from my hand and tossed it into the plastic trash barrel next to the counter, I saw that I had been about to serve myself something called vanilla cinnamon hazelnut coffee. The man took a clean cup from the stack and put it under the coffee dispenser.
“No, no, man,” I said. “You saved me. I don’t want that crazy sweet stuff.” I winced at myself for calling him “man.”
“What do you want?” the man said. He was clearly anxious to see me out of the store. “And,” he said, “it is not Monday. It is Sunday.”
“Sunday,” I said. “Sunday, Sunday.” I tried to sound humorous, resigned in the way that people who have terrible jobs with too many hours and awful pay use to try to keep their spirits up. “Work so much I can’t remember what day it is. Terrible that us stiffs have to work on Sundays, isn’t it?”
“What would you like?” he said.
“Oh, four. Four large of whatever dark roast stuff you have, without any flavors.”
“The French roast,” he said. He lifted a carafe with a laminated card taped to it that read PARISIAN CAFÉ, NOIR! and raised and lowered it by the handle to test how much coffee was left. “There is not enough for four. You will—” I could not understand what he said after. I lost the English words in the accents and syntax of his first language.
“I’m sorry, man,” I said, now so irritated with myself at saying “man” that I just wanted to storm off with neither coffee nor smokes; I didn’t deserve them because I kept calling this guy “man” and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying. “I’m kind of half out of it this morning,” I said. “What?”
He repeated himself and I still could not understand. It sounded like he was saying something about how I would not find any of the sort of coffee I wanted available for my friends, but also like there wasn’t any left in the whole world, or something like that, which I knew was wrong. It was upsetting to listen so closely and just not be able to understand the guy. I felt like I was insulting him. I winced and shook my head, trying to show him I was sorry, but it just wasn’t getting through my thick skull, it was all my fault. He repeated himself, but I still could not understand a word he said. I felt like I was in a weird dream, like it was just a matter of paying closer attention, but that I couldn’t get myself to concentrate.
Embarrassed as I was, I knocked on the top of my head and said, “Oh, brother, I’m so sorry; I just can’t understand a word. You know, I’ll just get four cups full of whatever’s made and the guys can just like it or—”
He put a hand up and said, “No.”
I said, “No—”
“No,” he said again. He folded his raised hand so just the forefinger stuck up. “Wait.”
“Oh, no, man; it’s okay; it’s fine. You don’t need to—”
“Wait.”
I nodded. He tested the other carafes in the rack and picked up three of them and walked into the back room. Although he was clearly irritated, he did not hurry. I looked outside, worried that someone would pull up and come in while he was out back. The weather was changing. The sharp, blustery cold from overnight looked like it was being pushed away by warmer, billowy winds that seemed to be turning the dew in the grass to fog before my eyes. The meadows behind the stone walls across the street, at the end of the Tucker estate development, seemed to be steaming. While he was rummaging around in the back I looked at the items for sale near the cash register—pens with lights in them, beef jerky, car air fresheners. The cigarettes were stored in an overhead rack, in push trays, above the counter. Taped to the rack, facing out toward where the customers stood to pay, were two photographs, one of a boy about two years old, one of a girl around eight, I guessed. I leaned in toward the picture of the girl. She was dressed in a blue sari and there was a white flower in her hair. Her hair was dark and braided and very long. The braid was draped in front of her, over her shoulder, and reached below her waist. I thought she must never have had her hair cut. From the size and shape of her hands and her cheeks, I decided that, yes, she was in second grade, or whatever the equivalent was in what I now guessed must be India, given what I thought was her Indian sari. Kate had looked like that when she was eight, skinny, getting taller, but still almost somehow like not a baby or a toddler but what Susan and I had always called a little kid, as distinguished from a big kid. “Ooh, look at you!” I’d say to Kate and scoop her up in a hug and kiss her cheeks and ears and head. “You’re almost a big kid!”
The man came from the back of the store, lugging four carafes of coffee. He hoisted them onto the counter.
“I made you an extra amount of the French roast,” he said, slowly, as if speaking to a dull child. I was afraid that he was going to help me fill the cups, but he replaced three of the carafes in the rack and left the fourth one on the counter and returned to behind the register, beneath the racks of cigarettes.
I began to fill the cups. The pumps on the carafes squeezed out only a couple of ounces of coffee at a time, so I had to keep pumping—almost, I imagined, like the old well water pumps people used to have in their yards. As I pushed on the pump, I nodded toward the photographs.
“Are those your children?”
“Yes. Those are my children,” the man said.
“They are beautiful.”
The man said, “Thank you.”
“How old are they? Two and eight, or so?”
“My son is now five and my daughter is eleven.” The pictures were old, then, I thought.
“Do they go to school here?” I asked.
“They are in India, with my wife.”
I finished filling the first cup. I put a cap on it and began filling the second.
“Are your kids finishing up the school year before they move here?” I asked.
“I am saving up money so that they can move here,” the man said. I understood that the man’s
situation was bad. I felt terrible suddenly for trying to win him over with pleasing small talk about his kids and bringing up a painful situation instead. But, I thought, the pictures are facing out and that must mean that he wants people to know about his family.
“Are they coming soon? Have you been away from them long?” I asked. I figured that I might as well show concern. I had real concern now, in fact, and there was no reason not to show it, I guessed. The guy couldn’t think any worse of me, anyway.
“I do not know when they can come. I have not seen them in three years,” he said.
“Oh, man,” I said. “That’s awful.” The second cup was full. I put a lid on it and placed it next to the other full cup and started pumping coffee into a third. The coffee was scalding hot, even through the paper of the cup, and I had to keep letting go of it to cool my hand off. It smelled sour and acidic.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I took a step toward the register and offered my right hand toward the man. “My name is Charlie,” I said. “Charlie Crosby.” The man shook my hand, limply, not because he lacked backbone or character, which was what I’d always been told by my grandfather a limp handshake indicated. (“Don’t offer a wet noodle,” he’d say. “Don’t try to break someone’s hand, either, especially a woman’s. But be firm, outgoing, confident. It makes a good first impression.”) I guessed he offered such a poor handshake because it was not something to which he was fully accustomed. I hoped that I hadn’t offended him. I felt like an idiot for worrying that I’d offended him and for thinking vaguely ignorant things like maybe in his culture people thought shaking someone else’s hand was unsanitary or demeaning. Too late now, I thought. I might as well just plunge forward, in good faith.