The grocery store manager told a ten-year-old boy that nobody wanted to touch his hand and to go beg somewhere else, so my seventy-four-year-old father walked past him to get a look at the sign. It offered handshakes, left hand only. We didn’t know yet who he was getting ready for, or who in that parking lot owed it something.
He’d been out there nine afternoons, and in nine more days somebody was coming home who needed him to get it right.
I’d only stopped for a rotisserie chicken and Dad’s blood pressure pills.
Dad was pushing the cart, because Dad doesn’t let anybody push the cart.
The kid stood by the cart corral in Altoona with a square of cardboard held flat against his chest.
FREE HANDSHAKES.
LEFT HAND ONLY.
Under that, smaller, in marker: practicing for my dad.
The manager came out through the automatic doors in a green polo and a lanyard, maybe twenty-nine, and planted himself between the kid and the entrance.
“Nobody wants to touch your hand, buddy,” he said. “Go beg somewhere else. This is private property.”
“He’s not begging,” somebody said from the bench.
A woman around sixty-eight sat there with a canvas bag of yarn in her lap and a cane hooked over the armrest.
“He hasn’t asked a soul for a dime,” she said.
The manager didn’t even turn his head toward her. He checked his phone like he was deciding whether we were worth a call.
There was one of those little plastic race-car carts in the corral, the kind kids ride in, and its steering wheel was gone.
Dad left our cart crooked across the walkway.
My father has been a hard man my whole life.
He walked up to that kid and held out his LEFT hand.
The kid moved the sign to his right arm and grabbed for it.
It was clumsy.
Their thumbs missed. His face went red to the ears and he let go and started over.
“Sorry,” he said. “Again. Can we do it again?”
The second time they got it. He gripped, pumped twice, and held on, staring down at their two hands like he had to memorize them for a test.
“How was that?” he said.
“Good grip,” Dad said. “Who taught you to look a man in the eye like that?”
“My dad. On the phone.”
The woman on the bench was his grandmother, Janice. She said his name before he could.
Callum.
He was right-handed. He’d never once thought about it until this summer.
His father, Zane, had been in a rehab hospital four hours east for nineteen months.
“His right side doesn’t work good yet,” Callum said. “He can do left. So I gotta be able to do left.”
“So you’re practicing on strangers,” Dad said.
“I can’t mess it up in front of him.” He looked down at the pavement. “He’ll think it’s because of him.”
Nobody had an answer for that.
The manager was still standing there.
“Okay, great, it’s a sweet story,” he said. “He still can’t do it at my front door. I’ve had two complaints.”
“From who?” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
Dad turned around slow, the way he’d turn around at the dinner table when one of us mouthed off.
“Son, how many people have you shaken hands with?”
He was asking Callum. He was looking at the manager.
Callum flipped the cardboard over. The back was covered in pencil tally marks, rows and rows of five.
“Sixty-three since I started,” he said. “Eleven today. Most people walk by.”
“Make it twelve,” a man said behind us. He was carrying a case of water, and he shifted it onto his other arm to do it.
Then a lady with a toddler on her hip.
Then a teenager in a fast-food visor who said, “Dude, left hand is weird,” and did it twice.
Callum added a mark after every single one. Pressing hard.
Janice told me the rest while they lined up.
Zane had been driving home from a night shift when a pickup went over the guardrail ahead of him and landed upside down in the median. Gas everywhere. He went in after the driver anyway.
He got him out.
Then the truck caught.
“They gave him a plaque,” Janice said. “He can’t hold it yet.”
I asked who the driver was. I don’t know why I asked.
“Some young guy. Never came by. Never called. NOT ONCE.” She pulled the yarn tighter in her lap. “Zane says leave it alone. He says people get scared.”
Callum came over with the sign under his arm and dug in the back pocket of his shorts.
“You want to see my dad? He was in the paper.”
It was a clipping, gone soft as cloth from being folded so many times.
A photo from the night of the crash, taken from the roadside. Zane on a stretcher with a blanket up to his chin. A young man sitting on the guardrail behind him, head in his hands.
The caption under it named them both.
I read the second name three times.
Then I looked up at the automatic doors.
The manager was still there with his phone. His lanyard had flipped around, and the tag pinned to his polo said DILLON.
And Callum, holding the clipping out toward him in his LEFT hand, said, “Mister, can I shake yours?”
The automatic doors
Dillon looked at the clipping. He didn’t look at the hand.
He took the paper by one corner and held it close to his face. His phone was still in his other hand. The screen lit up with a text and he didn’t look at that either.
It took him a long time to read eleven lines.
Then he folded it back along its old folds, laid it on Callum’s open palm, and said, “You need to go home, buddy.”
The doors slid open for him and he went in. They slid shut behind him.
Callum stood there with the clipping on his hand. The hand was still out.
“He didn’t want to,” he said.
“Put that in your pocket, baby,” Janice said. “It’ll tear.”
Dad went down on one knee, which he does not do anymore, and got level with him.
“Why’d you ask that man, son?”
“Dad says if somebody looks scared, you go first,” Callum said. “So they don’t have to.”
Dad didn’t say anything to that. He put his left hand on the kid’s shoulder and used it to get back up.
I looked over at Janice. I don’t know what I expected. A hand over her mouth, maybe. My mother would have cried right there on that bench in front of everybody.
Janice was zipping the yarn bag shut. She hadn’t looked at the doors once.
Dad’s cart
Dad has pushed the cart since Mom died. Before that she pushed it and he walked behind her with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the price tags like they’d insulted him personally.
Twenty-two years he’s filled his prescriptions at that counter in the back. Rajiv, the pharmacist, knows his birthday and his insurance number by heart and asks about his knee before he asks for his name. That afternoon Rajiv had the cholesterol pills ready and said the blood pressure ones were short at the warehouse.
“Tomorrow after three, Mr. Walczak,” he said. “I’ll hold them.”
Out in the car the chicken sweated in its plastic dome on the floor mat. Dad sat with the white pharmacy bag on his knee and didn’t put his seat belt on.
Before we left, Callum had let me take a picture of the clipping with my phone. “Everybody does,” he said, and held it flat on the hood of somebody’s Buick so it wouldn’t curl. Janice wrote her number on the back of my pharmacy receipt in case the picture came out blurry.
“You remember the men from the plant coming to the house?”
I remembered. I was ten. Every man who walked through our front door, Dad made me stand up and shake his hand, and if my grip was soft he made me do it again right there in front of them.
“Again,” he’d say. Not mean. Not nice either.
I hated him for it for about thirty years.
“That kid did it twice and said sorry,” Dad said. “I never let you say sorry.”
At his house he put the chicken in the fridge whole, which he never does, and stood there with the fridge door open, letting the cold out.
“We’re going back tomorrow,” he said.
“Rajiv said after three.”
“Then we go at three.”
Register four
At ten after three the next day Callum was already by the corral, and somebody had zip-tied a new sign to the corral post. NO SOLICITING. Laminated.
Callum was holding his cardboard a little lower than yesterday.
Dad went straight to him. He held out his left hand and the kid took it first try, and I went in for the pills.
Rajiv had the bag waiting on the counter with Dad’s name in blue pen.
“He’s not coming in?” Rajiv said.
“He’s out front shaking hands.”
I didn’t need anything else. I bought a pack of gum at register four anyway, because the woman working it had been at that register yesterday when the man with the case of water walked out. Her tag said KARI.
“You were with the old man yesterday,” she said. “With the boy.”
“Somebody complained, he said. Twice.”
Kari slid the gum across the scanner. She didn’t look up.
“There weren’t any complaints,” she said. “He tells us to say that if anybody asks.”
“So why does he care?”
“He has us call up to the office the minute the boy shows. Every day. He told us that the first afternoon.” She handed me the receipt. “Then he goes and stands in there.”
She tipped her head toward the customer service desk. Behind it was a door with a square of glass in it, and the door was propped open on a rubber wedge.
I put the gum in my purse and walked over like I needed a money order.
Inside the office there was a desk with nothing on it but a phone charger, and a monitor on the wall split into four squares. The deli. The loading dock. Register two. The front walk.
Dillon stood in front of it with his arms folded and his lanyard tucked into his polo.
In the bottom square, a boy was shaking my father’s left hand. Dillon hadn’t sat down.
The bench
Ten minutes later Dillon came out with a sheet of paper and a roll of packing tape.
He taped the paper to the arm of the bench, right next to Janice’s cane. It said TRESPASS WARNING across the top in bold, and under that a paragraph from the company, and under that a blank line for a name.
“This is your formal notice, ma’am,” he said. “Next time I call it in.”
Dad stood up off the bench. He’d been sitting next to Janice, which I had never in my life seen him do with a stranger.
He held out his right hand. His real hand. The one he uses.
“Harry Walczak,” he said. “I’ve been buying groceries at this store since before you were born.”
Dillon looked at the hand the same way he’d looked at Callum’s.
“I don’t shake hands with customers, sir. It’s policy.”
“Since when?”
“Since I wrote it.” Dillon pulled his phone out of his back pocket and held it up, not dialing, just holding it. “And if you want to stand out here with them, you can have your name on one of these too. Up to you.”
Dad’s hand stayed out there in the air a second too long. Then he put it in his pocket, the way he used to walk behind my mother.
Dillon went back in.
Callum peeled the tape off the bench real slow so it wouldn’t rip the paint, folded the warning in quarters and handed it to his grandmother. Then he went back to the corral and held up his sign.
Dad followed him over. He was showing him something with their two left hands, where to put the thumb.
That left me on the bench with Janice.
“There’s a Giant Eagle six blocks from your house,” I said. I didn’t know that. I guessed.
“Four blocks,” Janice said.
“His picture was in the store flyer in March,” she said. “New manager. Smiling. Holding a cake from the bakery. I knew his face from the guardrail.”
“And Callum?”
“Callum thinks this is where the people are,” she said. “He didn’t know whose store it was until that clipping came out of his pocket yesterday. I never told him.”
“Does Zane know you come here?”
“Zane thinks we go to the library after school.” “He comes home Tuesday. The van drops him at four. First thing he wants is to see where Callum’s been practicing. So I’ll bring him here.”
“To this door.”
“Nine more days,” Janice said. “I want that man to look at it nine more days.”
The second name
That night I sat at Dad’s kitchen table with the picture of the clipping on my phone and spread it with two fingers until the newsprint went to dots.
The caption was two lines.
Zane Alonso, 34, of Altoona, is loaded into an ambulance after pulling the driver of an overturned pickup from the median of Route 22. The driver, Dillon Eldridge, 27, waits on the guardrail.
Dad had his readers on and the chicken out on a plate between us, finally carved. He ate standing up, leaning on the counter.
“Look up the paper,” he said.
The newspaper’s site had the first story, the one from the clipping. Under it was a link to another one, two weeks later and a lot shorter. I read it once to myself.
“Read it to me,” Dad said.
He put the plate down and pulled out the chair across from me and sat, and held his left hand out over the table.
“Do it with me while you read,” he said. “Left.”
I put my phone in my right hand and gave him my left. Our thumbs missed. Both of us looked at the miss.
“Again,” Dad said.
The second time we got it. He held on. His hand was dry and bigger than I remembered, and I had not held it since the funeral home.
I read the second paragraph with my father holding my hand across his kitchen table.
State police said Eldridge was cited for using a handheld device while driving. Eldridge could not be reached for comment. Alonso remains in intensive care.
He’d been looking at his phone when he went over the guardrail.
Four o’clock
I called Janice the next morning from the number on the receipt. I told her I was going to tell him about Tuesday.
“You do that, and you’re doing it without me,” she said, and hung up.
She came anyway. She was on the bench at three-thirty with the yarn bag, and she didn’t look at me.
Callum had seventy-nine marks.
I walked up to the automatic doors with my phone in my hand and the article on the screen. I didn’t have to ask Kari to call the office. Dillon was already coming out.
I held the phone up so he could read it.
“He comes home Tuesday,” I said. “They’ll be out here at four.”
Dillon was standing on the rubber mat, so the doors kept sliding open behind him and closing and opening again. Cold air from the produce section came out over us every time.
“You think I don’t know what day it is?” he said. “You think I need a lady from the parking lot to tell me what day it is? I know the date. I know the mile marker. I drive the long way around to get here so I don’t go past it. Forty minutes, every day, both ways.”
“My lawyer said do not go near that family. Do not call. Do not send a card. You go near them, it’s an admission, and they take the house, and I don’t even have a house, I have my mother’s house. That’s what he said. So I paid the ticket. Two hundred and thirty-five dollars. You want to know what it cost me? Two hundred and thirty-five dollars. That’s what the state says it’s worth.”
Kari had stopped ringing at register four. She was just standing with somebody’s bag of oranges in her hand.
“And he called me,” Dillon said. “In April. From that hospital. Some nurse held the phone up to him, I could hear her telling him to go slow. And I hung up. I stood in my mother’s kitchen and I hung up on the guy.”
Janice put her knitting down.
“He called you,” she said.
“Twice. Second time I didn’t pick up.” Dillon pointed at Callum without looking at him. “And then the kid. Every day at my door with that sign. Practicing for my dad. I come in at seven and I know he’s coming at three. You want to know about complaints? I’m the complaints. Kari, go ahead. Tell her.”
Kari didn’t say anything. She put the oranges down.
“I’ve got nothing to say to a ten-year-old,” Dillon said. “What am I supposed to say? What is there?”
Callum walked over from the corral. He put his sign under his right arm.
“Dad said you’d be scared,” he said. “He said go first.”
He held out his left hand.
The doors opened. Closed.
Dillon moved his phone from his left hand to his right. He wiped his left palm down the front of his polo and took the kid’s hand. It was clumsy. Their thumbs missed.
“Again,” Callum said.
The second time they got it. Callum pumped twice and let go first, and went back to the corral and turned the cardboard over and added a mark. Eighty.
Dillon looked at his own hand. Then he looked at me, and at my father beside the bench.
“You and him can shop someplace else,” he said. “Starting today.”
“Twenty-two years,” Dad said.
“Then it was a good run.”
Tuesday
Dad’s pills come from the drugstore out by the mall now, in a bag with a different logo. The girl there spells Walczak wrong every time.
We didn’t need anything on Tuesday. We parked in the lot at a quarter to four anyway, out by the cart return, and Dad left the car crooked across two spaces.
The van came at four.
Zane was thinner than the clipping. His right arm lay in his lap like somebody had set it there for him. Janice pushed the chair up onto the walk, and she was the one talking a mile a minute, about the library, about the bus.
Callum was standing by the corral with the sign held flat against his chest.
He put it under his right arm and held out his left hand to his father.
Their thumbs landed the first time.
Zane laughed, a big ugly laugh that bent him over in the chair, and Callum held on and stared down at their two hands.
Behind them the automatic doors slid open. Dillon stepped out onto the rubber mat in the green polo and stood there, and the doors stayed open.
Zane saw him. He didn’t let go of his son. He held his left hand out past Callum’s shoulder.
Beside me, Dad took his own left hand out of his pocket.
Dillon wiped his palm down the front of his polo and walked out to take it.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who once made you shake a hand twice.
For more stories about old ties resurfacing when you least expect them, read the officer who shared Sunday dinner with a family for twenty years and the man whose old nickname came back at Aunt Darla’s grill. And for another tense moment when someone steps in to protect a neighbor, there’s the spare key and the stump grinder.
