The shift manager held a $2.79 sheet of gold star stickers over his head so the entire pharmacy line could see it and said, “This is what a thief looks like at seventy-eight.” The woman next to him didn’t argue. She only said, “Please, don’t let the kids hear about this,” and kept watching the door.
I figured she meant grandkids.
I was two people back with a bottle of cough syrup for my wife and a bag of pretzels I didn’t need.
It was 7:51 on a Tuesday in Kenosha, and I’d come straight off a double.
She had on a red wool coat buttoned to the throat and white sneakers that had been scrubbed, not replaced.
The manager’s tag said BRAD.
He was maybe forty-four, gelled hair, and he was having a good morning.
“Found it in her coat pocket,” he said to nobody. To everybody.
Her prescription was paid for.
The white bag sat stapled shut next to the card reader with the receipt stuck to the front.
The cough drops were paid for too.
The stickers were the only thing in her life she hadn’t rung up.
The cashier, Tabitha by her tag, kept trying.
“Brad, she paid for the other stuff. She PAID.”
“She paid for what she got caught with,” he said.
A phone came up behind me.
Then two more.
A guy in a camo hat was narrating under his breath like it was a nature show.
“Ma’am, why was it in your pocket?” Brad said.
“No idea,” she said. “I thought I set it down.”
“You thought.”
He repeated it at double the volume, like noise was going to shake a better answer out of her.
She quit giving reasons and went to apologizing instead.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
She was folding a pharmacy coupon in half, then in half again, until it went soft as cloth.
I know that kind of sorry. You say it when the guy with the most volume has already made up his mind, and agreeing is the quickest way to the door.
I used to be the guy people said it to.
I don’t like remembering that.
I’m six-four and wide, and I’ve got a face that makes people pick another aisle.
I went around the pretzel rack anyway.
“Ring hers up with mine,” I said.
I put the cough syrup down too hard. The bottle cracked down and she flinched like I’d swung at her.
I took my hand back.
Brad’s eyes went over my jacket and my hands before they made it up to me.
“Sir, this is store business.”
“Then sell her the stickers,” I said. “That’s what a store does.”
“I can have the police here in six minutes.”
“You can have three bucks off me in six seconds.”
Nobody yelled. People shuffled in tighter, hoping one of us would.
They weren’t getting that from me.
Tabitha dragged a plastic chair over from the blood pressure machine.
The machine still showed somebody’s numbers from earlier. 141 over 88.
I pointed her to it and backed off a few feet.
“You drive here yourself?” I said.
“I walk,” she said. “I have to be at the corner by eight.”
She looked at the clock over the photo counter.
7:56.
Then at the front window.
Across the street, little kids in puffy coats were bunching up at the curb outside the elementary school, backpacks bobbing.
Brad saw where she was looking.
He smiled with every tooth he had.
“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You’re the crossing lady. Maybe I skip the cops and call the school. Let the parents decide who walks their kids through traffic.”
That’s where her face finally went.
Everything else, she’d taken.
Not that.
“Please,” she said. “They’d take my vest. Please don’t do that.”
Her handbag sat open on her lap.
Folded on top, bright orange, was a reflective vest with a whistle clipped to the zipper.
“Put the phones AWAY,” I said to the camo hat.
He lowered it to his chest. Whether he’d hit stop, I had no way to know.
I turned back to Brad.
“YOU DON’T GET TO TAKE THAT OFF HER FOR THREE DOLLARS.”
He laughed.
“Watch me,” he said, and picked up the store phone.
7:58.
Out there a whistle should have been going. The kids kept stepping off the curb and back on, waiting for somebody.
She stood up out of the chair.
She reached up and turned my collar down flat with two fingers, quick and firm, like she’d done it a thousand mornings.
“Your collar’s been up since you came in,” she said. “And you still chew that thumbnail, Andre.”
I had never told her my name.
Nobody in that store had said it.
7:58 by the photo counter
Torgerson.
The name came up out of me before I knew I still had it.
Mrs. Torgerson. The corner outside that grade school. A different orange vest, the same kind of whistle, and a stop sign on a pole taller than I was.
She’d crossed me every school morning from second grade through fourth. On every one of those mornings she turned my collar down with those same two fingers. On most of them she told me to get my thumb out of my mouth.
I had it in my mouth right then. I took it out.
“Mrs. Torgerson,” I said.
“Judith,” she said. “You got too big for the Mrs.”
She sat back down in the plastic chair like her knees had been waiting for permission.
Behind the counter Brad had the store phone pinned against his shoulder. He was looking at the two of us the way a guy looks at a parking ticket somebody else got.
“Yeah, hi,” he said into it. “Is Gretchen in yet?”
Judith’s head came up at the name.
Across the street the kids were still stepping on and off the curb. One of them had a pink hat with a pompom the size of a grapefruit. She was out in front, the way there’s always one out in front.
“I knew it was you when you came in,” Judith said. “You still walk like you’re late for something.”
“You didn’t say.”
“You had your collar up. I figured you didn’t want to be found.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I was fifty-two years old and I didn’t have one.
Tabitha stood behind the till with both hands flat on it, like it might float off.
The camo hat had his phone against his chest. From where I stood it was a black square. It could have been doing anything.
“I’ve missed four mornings at that corner,” Judith said. “In forty-four years. Two funerals, a broken wrist and the blizzard.”
She’d counted. Of course she’d counted.
Forty-four years. Brad’s whole life, and then some.
I did the other math too. She’d been thirty-four the winter I met her. Younger than my daughter is now.
“Tell her it’s Brad,” Brad said into the phone. “Brad Wenzel. She’ll know.”
He waited, tapping the sticker sheet against the edge of the counter. He grinned at me over it.
“Gretchen,” he said. “Hi. Yeah. It’s me again.”
The corner, January 1983
I was eight that winter and already bigger than the fifth graders.
My mother ran a mangle at the hospital laundry on nights. She got home at seven-forty. By then I’d been out the door twenty minutes, coat on, nothing done up.
Nobody buttoned anything for me. I didn’t think about it. That’s just how my mornings went.
The corner was Judith Torgerson’s.
She had the sign on a pole, a whistle, and a spiral notebook in her coat pocket that the kids called the plate book. If a car went around her sign, she wrote the plate down. Fridays she mailed the page to the principal.
Every dad on that block knew about the plate book.
That January I shoved a kid named Steve off the curb into the slush.
He was a second grader in a Bears hat, and he’d been standing where I wanted to stand. That was the whole reason. I was eight.
He sat down in the gray water by the gutter and cried. His mother was in a station wagon at the light and saw all of it.
I knew how it went from there. The office. The secretary calling my mother, who’d be asleep. Me on the bench outside the principal’s door, listening to the phone ring and ring at our apartment.
Judith walked Steve over to the station wagon first. She talked at the window a long time. I couldn’t hear any of it.
Then she came back to me.
She turned my collar down with two fingers, quick and firm. She did up my top button. She looked at my thumb, which was in my mouth, and she waited till I took it out.
“You’re big,” she said.
I figured that was the start of it.
“Big is useful,” she said. “Big kids go at the back. You’re my line.”
I didn’t know what that meant. So she showed me.
The kids bunched up at the curb and I stood behind them. Nobody stepped off till they heard the whistle. Not one boot. If a boot went, I said “back of the line,” the way she said it. Then she walked out to the middle with the sign up, and blew, and they went.
“You hold them,” she said. “I cross them. You don’t ever cross them. That’s my job.”
I held that line two and a half years.
Fridays she brought a sheet of gold star stickers from the drugstore across the street. A star went on the back of every glove that had waited for the whistle.
Mine got one every Friday after that. Even the Friday I hadn’t earned it, and we both knew I hadn’t.
By June I had nineteen stuck to the inside lid of my lunchbox.
Nobody from the office ever called my mother about Steve.
Steve and I held the back of that line together by spring. He stood on my left. He never said a word about the slush, and neither did I.
That was her doing. I didn’t understand it till I had kids of my own.
The last morning was a Friday in June, the year I was nine.
She gave me my star like always. Then she turned my collar down, even though it was June and I had on a T-shirt with no collar at all.
She did it anyway. Two fingers on the neck of the shirt, flat.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Keep your thumb out of your mouth.”
That was the last time.
I left that school at nine, for the middle school out past the tracks, and I lost track of her the way you lose track of everybody at nine. Then I grew into my size. For about ten years in my twenties, I was the guy people said that kind of sorry to.
She didn’t see any of that. I’d always been glad of it.
Now it was 7:59, and she was in a plastic chair by a blood pressure machine with her vest folded on her lap.
And the line was out there with nobody holding it.
The whistle on the zipper
“Gretchen, I’ve got your crossing lady here,” Brad said into the phone. “In my store. With merchandise.”
Judith stood up.
“I have to go,” she said. “It’s eight.”
Brad put his hand over the phone. “You walk out that door, ma’am, that’s leaving with unpaid merchandise.”
“It’s on your counter,” I said.
“Then it’s leaving the scene. Either way, the police are a phone call.” He held up the phone so I’d know which one he meant.
She sat back down. It took her two tries.
Then she unclipped the whistle from the zipper of the vest, and she held them both out to me.
“No,” I said.
“Back of the line,” she said. “Nobody steps off till the whistle. You don’t cross them. You hold them.”
“Judith, I’m nobody. I’m a guy off a double who came in for cough syrup.”
“You were my line.” She pushed the vest into my stomach. “Go.”
I went.
The door chimed behind me. Outside, the wind came off the lake and went straight down my collar, which was down now, so it went everywhere.
I had the vest in one hand. It wouldn’t have gone around one of my arms.
There were maybe twenty kids at the curb. Parents idling along the drop-off lane. The sign on its pole was chained to the school fence where she always left it, and nobody had a key to the chain but her.
The pink hat already had one boot in the street.
“Back of the line,” I said.
It came out in her voice. There’s no other way I can tell it. Same three words, same flat way, and the pink hat stepped back up on the curb like somebody had a string on her.
Then all twenty of them turned around and looked up at me.
Six-four. Work jacket. Not wearing the vest, just holding it. A whistle in my fist.
A minivan window came down. “Excuse me. Who are you?”
“Mrs. Torgerson’s.” I didn’t have the rest of it. “She’s held up across the street. She asked me to hold them.”
“Held up how?”
Another phone came up, this one out of the minivan.
A man in a suit coat got out of a sedan and stood between his son and me. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.
A little boy near the front looked up at me and put his thumb in his mouth.
I almost laughed. I almost told him to take it out.
I kept my hands where everybody could see them instead.
I’ve had a lot of practice at that. Big men learn it early or they learn it in the back of a squad car.
I stayed put behind the kids. I didn’t step into the street. I didn’t blow the whistle. I held the line like she’d told me, and every parent on that block looked at me like I was what the school had sent a flyer home about.
The wind kept coming. A bus went by and the whole curb leaned back from it, twenty kids at once.
Nobody stepped off.
Then the front door of the school came open, and a woman came out fast in a long gray parka with a lanyard swinging. Fifty or so. Phone still in her hand.
She looked at the empty middle of the street first. Then at me.
“You’re not Judith,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
“Brad Wenzel just told me she’s in his store for stealing.”
“For a sheet of stickers,” I said. “He’s got the whole line filming it.”
She held out her hand. I put the whistle in it.
She didn’t have the key to the chain either, so she walked out to the middle with her arm up instead of a sign, and blew, and the kids crossed. The pink hat went past me with her mouth open.
Then the woman came straight back across, past me, past the minivans, to the drugstore.
“Show me,” she said, and pulled the door open herself.
Tag 114
There was a silver Ford pickup parked in the fire lane out front.
A booster seat in the back. A green tag hanging off the mirror with a number on it in black marker. 114.
Gretchen looked at that truck the whole way past it.
I looked at it too. There was a juice box on the dash, and a small coat on the booster seat.
A kid’s coat. Blue, with the hood up like somebody had taken it off in a hurry.
Inside, Brad had hung up. He came around the counter for her with the sticker sheet up again, the way he’d held it for the line, except now it was for one person.
“Gretchen. Thanks for coming over. I hate this.”
He didn’t look like he hated it.
“Seventy-eight years old,” he said. “Coat pocket. I asked her nice why, and she couldn’t tell me. That’s not me being mean. That’s me asking.”
Gretchen went to Judith first. She crouched down next to the plastic chair, parka and all.
“Judith. Did you pay for these?”
Judith had the coupon going again. She’d unfolded it, and now she was folding it back down.
“I can’t say, Gretchen,” she said. “I thought I set them down.”
Of everything anybody said in that store, that was the one I couldn’t stand.
Gretchen stood back up slow, one hand on her knee.
Then Judith looked past her, out the front window, at the pickup in the fire lane.
She reached into her coat, the pocket on the other side, and took out a spiral notebook with the cover gone soft.
The plate book. Forty-some years, and it was the same size.
She thumbed it open near the back. Her glasses hung on a cord around her neck and she didn’t put them on. She didn’t need them for this page.
“One-fourteen,” she said. “Silver Ford. October third. October twentieth. October twenty-eighth. Went around my sign with children in the street.”
She looked up at Brad.
“That’s your truck.”
Brad’s face didn’t do anything for about a second.
Then it did plenty.
He turned the color of the stickers’ backing paper, that pale waxy yellow.
The camo hat leaned to see the book. So did a woman behind him with a basket of shampoo.
“Gretchen,” he said. “I’m not doing this.”
“Is this about the letter, Brad?”
“This is about a theft.”
“I asked you in my office if you wanted to talk about the letter. You said you were fine.”
“I am fine. She writes my plate in a book like I’m some drunk, she mails it to you, you mail me a letter on school paper. Fine. That’s done. This is a thief in my store at seven-fifty in the morning.”
The camo hat said “huh” under his breath, like the nature show had gone somewhere he didn’t expect.
Brad heard it. He turned it back around fast.
“And you want to know what I think? She’s got a grudge. She’d say anything about me.” He pointed the sticker sheet at Judith like a ruler. “Ask her what she paid for, Gretchen.”
He leaned both elbows on the glass.
“Go ahead. Ask her what she remembers.”
Dorota’s not in till nine
Nobody asked her.
Gretchen looked at Judith. Judith looked at the white bag by the card reader. I looked at Brad’s hand.
He had a coil cord around his wrist, the stretchy plastic kind, the color of a dentist’s bib. On the end of it hung a small silver key.
I’d seen him come out of the back with it when I first walked in. Coffee in the other hand. He’d ducked under the pharmacy gate, which was halfway down, with a sign taped to it. PHARMACIST ON DUTY 9 AM.
“Who’s back there this early?” I said.
Tabitha answered before Brad could.
“Nobody. Dorota’s not in till nine on Tuesdays. Brad does the back register till she gets here.”
“Tabitha,” Brad said. “Go do the cigarette count.”
“I did it at seven.”
“Then do it again.”
She looked at me. She looked at Judith. Then she went down to the locked case at the end of the aisle and stood there with her back to us, not counting anything.
She was twenty-one. I’d have gone too.
The blood pressure machine still said 141 over 88. Nobody had sat in it since.
Gretchen asked the camo hat if he’d been filming.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe?”
“I was. Then I put it down.” He looked at me. “He told me to.”
That was true. I had.
Brad was back behind the counter now, both hands on it, like it was his porch. He was talking to Gretchen about store policy and shrink numbers and the district office. I stopped hearing him.
My phone buzzed in my jacket. My wife, wanting to know where the cough syrup was.
I let it buzz.
She’d been sick four days. She could wait four more minutes.
It was the first time in twenty years I’d let her wait for me, and I knew what that meant.
I was looking at the white bag.
The staple went through the folded top of it and through the receipt. Most pharmacy receipts are a little square with the copay on it.
This one hung down past the staple, folded twice, like it had more on it than one prescription.
The staple
“Judith,” I said. “Can I see your bag?”
She nodded.
“That’s a customer’s property,” Brad said. “Nobody touches—”
“It’s mine,” Judith said. “He can touch it.”
I picked it up. It weighed close to nothing. A bottle of pills and the paper they come wrapped in.
I didn’t pull the staple. I unfolded the tail of the receipt and held it flat against the bag with my thumb, the same thumb she’d been after me about since 1981, and I tipped it toward the window.
The print was small. I’m fifty-two. I held it out to Gretchen.
She put on her own glasses. She read it out loud, which I think was the principal in her. Every line, like attendance.
“Register four. Pharmacy. Seven forty-four a.m.” She ran a finger down. “One prescription. Copay four dollars.”
Then she stopped.
“Gold star stickers. One at two seventy-nine.”
Nobody in that store moved. The camo hat’s phone came up off his chest a couple of inches and stayed there.
“Subtotal six seventy-nine. Tax. Paid, debit.” Gretchen turned the bag over, then back. “Cashier. Brad W.”
Brad laughed. It was a short one.
“Okay. The register does that. It puts the manager on everything back there. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Reg four doesn’t put anybody on anything,” Tabitha said from the cigarette case. She hadn’t turned around. “It puts on whoever’s key is in it.”
Brad looked down at the coil on his wrist like it had climbed on him by itself.
Judith was looking at him too.
She’d quit folding the coupon. Her hands were flat on her knees. She said it slow, the way she’d read the plates.
“You stapled the bag,” she said. “Then you handed me the stickers. You said they wouldn’t fit. You said, ‘Pocket’s fine, ma’am.'”
She sat up straighter in the plastic chair. Then she said it to Gretchen.
“I didn’t set them down. He handed them to me.”
Register four
Brad started talking then, and he kept going a good while.
“Okay. So I rang her. Fine. You know how many people I ring up before eight? Back register, front register, the phone, a truck coming at nine. I rang her and I forgot I rang her. That’s on me. That’s a mistake. People make mistakes.”
He looked around for somebody to agree. The camo hat looked at his boots.
“But see, that’s my point. That’s my whole point, Gretchen. I forgot one sheet of stickers. Me. Forty-four years old. And she sat in that chair and couldn’t tell you if she paid. Ten minutes later. You want that in the road with a hundred kids?”
“Brad,” Gretchen said.
“With Linus? You want my kid out in traffic with somebody who can’t remember ten minutes ago?”
“Linus crosses with her every morning you don’t drive him around her sign.”
That shut him up for about one second.
“Three times,” he said. “Three times in a month I’m late to open, I go around her sign, there’s nobody even in the street yet. And she writes me in a book. She mails my plate to you like I hit somebody. And you read that list at the car-line meeting, Gretchen. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
“I read the numbers. I didn’t read names.”
“Everybody knew whose number. The other dads knew. And every morning after that, she blows that whistle at me. At me. A grown man, with my son in the truck.”
His voice had climbed, and he heard it, and he brought it back down.
He set the sticker sheet down, careful, like evidence that had let him down.
“So yeah,” he said. “I knew she paid. All right? I knew. I wanted you to watch her not know it.”
Nobody said anything to that. I didn’t have anything to add to it.
The camo hat cleared his throat.
“I never hit stop,” he said.
He held the phone out. Not to me. To Gretchen.
“I put it on my chest, but it’s been going the whole time. It’s got all of it.” He swallowed. “My daughter’s out there. The pink hat.”
Gretchen took the phone and played it with the sound low. We all heard it anyway.
Brad, loud: This is what a thief looks like at seventy-eight.
Brad, smiling, I could hear it: Maybe I skip the cops and call the school.
Then me. The bottle cracking down on the Formica. Judith in her red coat, flinching. My own voice, the big one, the one I spent my thirties getting rid of.
YOU DON’T GET TO TAKE THAT OFF HER FOR THREE DOLLARS.
Gretchen looked up from the phone at me.
“That’s you too,” she said.
“I know.”
“If I send this to his district office, I send all of it. You’re in it.”
I looked at the camo hat.
“Send her all of it,” I said.
Brad came around the counter again, and this time it was at me.
“You don’t come in here again. You hear me? You or your wife’s syrup. Go get it someplace else.” He pointed at Tabitha’s back. “And you. You can take that tag off.”
Tabitha unpinned her name tag and laid it next to the stickers. Then she went in the back for her coat without a word to him.
“Linus gets dropped at the front office from now on,” Gretchen said. “Not the car line. I’ll walk him in myself.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can do that, Brad.”
Then she turned to Judith.
Judith had the coupon in her hand still. She opened it up and smoothed it on her knee, flat as she could get it.
It was for two dollars off cough drops. It had expired Sunday.
“You keep your corner. Fatima comes out with you mornings till winter break.”
“I don’t need Fatima.”
“I know you don’t.”
Judith stood up. She put the vest on over the red coat and zipped it to the top, and she held her hand out for the whistle. Gretchen gave it to her.
Then she picked the sticker sheet up off the counter.
Brad opened his mouth.
She put it in her coat pocket. “Pocket’s fine,” she said, and went out the door.
Tuesday, 7:51
Three weeks later I was back on that street at 7:51 on a Tuesday, parked across from the school with the engine running.
My wife’s refill sat on the seat next to me in a bag from the place out on Highway 50. Twenty-five minutes each way now.
She doesn’t complain about the drive. The night the camo hat put his video up, she read me the comments out loud until she got to one about my size and my face. Then she set her phone face down on the table and left it there.
Sixty-one thousand people have watched me crack a bottle on Formica and yell at a man in a polo shirt.
At the corner, a young woman in a vest two sizes too big stood at the back of the kids with her arms out. Fatima, I guessed. Holding the line.
Judith was out front in the red coat.
She had a sheet of gold star stickers held up over her head so the whole line could see it.
“Friday,” she said. “Whoever waits for the whistle.”
The pink hat was up front. Where else would she be.
Judith blew the whistle and walked them across with the sign up, and then she came back across by herself and saw my truck.
She came over to the window. I rolled it down.
She reached in and turned my collar down flat with two fingers.
Then she peeled one gold star off the sheet and pressed it onto the back of my hand.
“Thumb,” she said.
I took it out of my mouth.
If there’s somebody who held the line for you once, at some corner, they might still be out there in the cold. This would be a good week to go find them.
For more stories about family wounds resurfacing at the most unexpected moments, read “My Stepson Turned In His Chair And Asked Her, ‘Are You The Porch Lady?'” and “My Daughter Asked Me To Leave. I Was Holding Her Dad’s Thirty-Eight Dollar Watch.”. And in “The Woman Who Cost Me My Diploma Was Waiting In Room 14 For My Delivery”, an old hurt returns at a life-changing moment.
