The Checkout Girl (13 page)

Kathy's making French toast before she leaves for work. Only Rhettbutler's up so far, and he's eating toast as fast as Kathy can get it out of the pan.

“How come you're not fat?” Kathy asks.

He pours maple syrup until the toast swims. When he's finished eating, he licks the plate and starts over.

“A boy after my own heart,” Penny says. She rumples his hair as she walks past him. “Just like his daddy, don't you think?” She's just out of the shower and her hair leaves drip trails down her blouse and the back of her jeans.

“Does he spit his food back on his plate?”

“Can I have the next batch?” Penny asks. Kathy slides two pieces of toast on a plate for her. Penny sits beside Rhettbutler and says, “You're much more mature than your daddy, aren't you, sweetie?”

“My ears are ringing,” Pete says. He's standing in the doorway, pulling on a white T-shirt. Kathy notices his chest is nearly hairless except for the black silky ones that curl around his nipples, and a few that form a dark line that begins under his navel and disappears into his jeans. He kisses the top of Rhettbutler's head.

“Hey, buddy,” he says. He takes Penny's long hair in his hands and shakes it; water droplets fly around the room.

“Peter Gerald Lehman!” Penny shouts.

While Penny's distracted, Pete steals her plate. She stabs the back of his hand with her fork. Five tine wounds puff up immediately; two bleed. Penny takes her plate back.

“Shit,” Pete yells, and shakes his hand. He cups Penny's chin and tries to look into her eyes, but she's looking at her plate. She cuts a corner from her French toast. Before she gets it to her mouth, Pete leans down and kisses her. Penny looks at him then, wide eyes staring into his. She holds the fork at the ready and when Pete releases her chin, she pops the toast into her mouth and smacks her lips.

“You're sweetness and light this morning,” he says and laughs.

Kathy hands Pete a plate and he sits on the other side of Rhettbutler.

He takes Rhettbutler's plate and pours the excess syrup from it onto his French toast. Rhettbutler screams and grabs the plate back. Syrup spills on the floor. Penny groans, but she keeps on eating.

“That's mine,” Rhettbutler says. Pete growls at his son and pretends to bite his ear. Rhettbutler ignores him. Penny finishes her French toast.

“You guys are crazy,” Kathy says. “And I have to leave soon.”

“Isn't it early for you?” Penny asks.

“I'm on union duty,” Kathy says. “A guy from the Retail Clerks Union is trying to help organize all the stores. I went to a meeting and volunteered to nab the people at my store in the break room before they punch in. Talk them into signing on. I give out pamphlets and say stuff like, ‘united we stand.' Marvin says I'm a communist. His mother told him, if I'm doing union work, I'm a commie.”

Marvin's a stock boy, whom Kathy's told them about before. He calls himself “third man” and technically he's right, because there are only four full-time grocery men in Kathy's store: the manager, the assistant manager, Marvin, and a never-ending stream of stock boys hired as “fourth man” who never last long because they realize fourth man means bottom of the rung, and that no one will ever get past Marvin in seniority.

Marvin started at the store when he was sixteen and boasts he's been working in the grocery business for twenty-two years. He's single and lives with his mother, with whom he fights. When they do, Marvin rages all day, telling anyone who will listen how he's going to get his own place. But by the end of the day he looks sheepish and wonders what his mother's making for supper, because she always makes a special meal after a fight.

Marvin has a round belly and freckled, pockmarked skin. His ties clip on, and he stores the tatty comb he uses to maintain his swirling pompadour in a pocket protector that says
Weston's Freshness Guaranteed
. His pants and cardigans are various browns; the pants have creases sewn in. His hands are big and red, often healing from some bruise or cut. Marvin will never join a union.

And other than Marvin there are only three full-time employees eligible for union status — managers, and produce and meat clerks are excluded — so Kathy knows the attempt is doomed. But union arguments are a switch from the routine of work, the coffee and cigarette and doughnut breaks, the noontime games of euchre for nickels or dimes, and the complaints about the smell of garbage near the loading dock, or the drafty doors, or whose turn it is to pack and carry out groceries for Kathy, especially when the weather is bad. Kathy's manager's been giving her the evil eye for days. He likes her, she knows, but he hates discord. And unions, he told Kathy, are a royal pain in the ass.

Kathy gathers the breakfast plates and starts washing them. When she turns around, Rhettbutler's climbing onto Penny's lap. His legs dangle outside hers; his bare feet almost touch the ground. He settles into her and hums. Penny turns his face to hers and licks the crumbs and syrup from around his mouth.

“You're yummy,” she says. She tickles him, and he giggles and snuggles closer.

Sometimes since the abortion, when Kathy watches Rhettbutler and Penny, she wonders what kind of mother she'd have been. But she doesn't dwell on it, stops herself from dwelling on it. Pete and Penny tell funny stories about the mistakes they made when Rhettbutler was a baby, about how nervous they were and how little they knew about being parents. But as they gained experience they relaxed, and they realized a baby was a pretty hardy little being. That's when they began to enjoy Rhettbutler, they said. As Kathy turns back to the sink to finish the dishes, she wonders what kind of parents Penny and Pete would be if they didn't have each other.

Pete gets up and leans against the counter next to Kathy. His arm brushes hers. Ever since Pete lay behind her on her bed, the thought that he might touch her makes her edgy, a dangerous, sexual jitteriness that she knows means nothing good. Kathy gets the frying pan from the stove. She slides it into the dishwater. The pan sizzles.

“You're gonna get yourself fired,” Pete says to her.

“They can't fire us for organizing,” Kathy says. “But we have been told to be extra careful about being on time and not making any mistakes on cash, that kind of thing. If I get fired I'm going to get Alan Eagleson to be my agent and become the first ex-checkout girl in the NHL. Then I'll be in the Players Association and we'll negotiate me a big fat contract.”

“We're in negotiations for our contract,” Penny says. “It's not looking good. We might end up on strike.”

“If you end up on strike, my lovely, and Kathy ends up fired, and The Eagle doesn't take her on as a client, then I'll be the only person bringing in a paycheque,” Pete says. “I'll have to get some extra stock in.”

“Little Barry,” Penny says. “He makes enough to support us all.”

“He spends every cent on women,” Pete says. He's not looking at Kathy.

“Women?” Penny asks.

“Is there more than one woman, Kathy?” Pete asks. He still isn't looking at her. “You live down in the dungeon; you must know.”

“Yes, there is,” Kathy says to Penny. Pete must know that Barry spends nights in Kathy's bed. She turns to Pete and says, “I didn't want to tell you, Pete, but Freddy's a girl. And Little Barry's in love with her.”

(She told Barry to go away. He was standing in her doorway and she was crying for no particular reason, as she had occasionally since the abortion. At the clinic they'd warned her it might happen. Fluctuating hormones, they said, that would settle after she'd had a couple of normal periods. But Barry didn't go; instead he sat and leaned his back against the doorframe and sang lullabies. “Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,” he sang, “go to sleep my little baby.” And one about a mucky kid, “dirty as a dust bin lid, when he finds out the things you did, you'll get a whack from your dad.” She just cried harder, so Barry came in and lay beside her and held her, shushed her and they fell asleep.)

“Yup, Barry and Freddy have a weird thing going,” Kathy says, and she smiles. “It's wild. You should see them. It's X-rated, man.” She smiles harder.

(In the morning, she told Barry what had happened. About Doug having sex with her after the Liberace concert, how she didn't want him to. She told him about the pillow over her face, the scrapes on her knuckles. She told him about the morning sickness, and what it felt like to be pregnant, her breasts sore, a kind of tingly feeling under her skin, like anxiety, but nicer. And in the rare moments when she wasn't worrying about what to do about the baby, how she felt dreamy and content. How she hoped to feel that way again some day, when the time was right.)

“Freddy flicks his little tongue at Barry.” Kathy demonstrates, turning toward Penny, stretching her neck out and flicking her tongue.

“Barry flicks his tongue at Freddy.” She demonstrates again, this time for Rhettbutler.

Penny laughs. Rhettbutler yells, “Fre-ddy. Ba-rry.”

(She told him everything; she lay on her side facing him; he lay on his side facing her. He listened and she fell asleep again. When she woke up he was gone. Like Pete had been gone, but different, a comfy gone that hadn't left her lonely. Barry slept beside her every night he was home and wasn't with Rachel. There had been no sex.)

“I'm sorry I have to break the news to you,” Kathy says, “but Pete, your snake's an engagement wrecker.”

She's grinning so hard her teeth have dried out. Pete grins back, like he's part of the game. He winks. Still grinning, she dries her hands on a dish towel. She grabs her jacket from a hook by the door and waves goodbye to them.

Kathy shivers as she walks to her car, not because it's cold, though it is a damp, low-sky day. She shivers because she's just dodged a bullet, and she feels ashamed for making fun of Barry.

The cool misty air and grey clouds are the right backdrop for mourning the students killed at Kent State University on Monday, shot by the Ohio National Guard while protesting the invasion of Cambodia. “An eerie quiet grips the campus after four are slain and seven wounded in rioting at Kent State University,” the newscast begins. “Anxious parents came from hundreds of miles away to escort their children from the scarred campus.” Closer to home, the announcer says, and goes on to describe another terrorist bomb blast in Montreal, the sixth in the last two weeks, and from there reports on rising concerns over the looming threat of rotating postal worker strikes at post offices throughout Canada.

“Enough already,” Kathy says out loud and turns the radio off.

She pulls around the back of the grocery store, which is the oldest in the chain, dark and small in comparison to the bright, big stores being built in suburban malls. It has narrow, cramped aisles lined with wood and metal shelves on the verge of collapse and creaky hardwood floors sanded and refinished once a year that within two weeks look worn and defeated once again. Caulking lifts in slabs from the edges of the front window panes. whose storm coverings are now permanent, cemented into place. Dead flies, spiders, mice, and a sparrow — no one could figure out how it got there — are trapped between the windows. Their carcasses rest upon the sill.

Kathy parks beside Sally's car and heads inside. Sally's called an office girl even though she's forty-something. She has kiss-curls in front of her tiny ears and horn-rimmed glasses that magnify her kohl-lined eyes. She's smiling a big toothy smile as she unlocks the door for Kathy.

“Mornin', me trout,” she says to Kathy.

Sally's kindness is legendary, as are her ruthless dealings with salesmen. She can laugh at herself, and says mistakes are just that, nothing monumental, nothing to stop you.

“Hi, Sally,” Kathy says. “I smell fresh coffee.”

“In my parlour,” Sally says as they walk through the store to the break room.

Sally's husband, Roy, has a severe heart condition and hasn't worked in seven years. He cleans and cooks, and has a whiskey sour ready for Sally when she gets home. “He does his part,” Sally once told Kathy, “and I keep us in rags and fags and hard tack.” Kathy pours Sally a coffee and one for herself and they sit at the break room table.

“What's the world coming to?” Sally says when Kathy mentions Kent State. “Killing kids in university. Don't know how those men will live with themselves. Bad enough for soldiers in wars. But killing's killing, isn't it? Roy never got over the war. That's why his heart gave out. Part's physical, I know, but the war ground him down. He came back old. Not all of them, but Roy did. He was only twenty-two and already tuckered out.

“Here's the terrible part, ducky. Before the war, Roy was a butcher's apprentice. So when he came back, they wanted him right quick in the slaughterhouse. Day in, day out, carving sides of beef. Bleak, cold place. Even before he got sick, his heart wasn't in it.

“You know what we do? Once in a blue moon, remind ourselves we're alive. We make love real slow, even though the doctor told Roy to give it up. ‘The kids have it right,' Roy tells me when I worry, ‘make love, not war.' So we do, even if it'll be the death of him.

“Oh, hell,” Sally adds, “give me one of those damn cards. You only live once. While I fill it out, you tell me what you're going to do about playing hockey this fall. I have to report back to Roy; he's taken an interest in you, girl.”

Sally's the only person who takes Kathy seriously when she makes offhand remarks about her hockey career. Everyone knows Kathy can skate, but they think she's joking about making it her work, which is in fact what she prefers them to think. If they think it's a joke, then Kathy doesn't have to do anything about it. But Sally, who is honest to a fault and so takes people at their word, assumed Kathy meant what she said and asked Roy about girls and the NHL.