My neighbor is 81, and she came home with an empty tote and told me the manager at our grocery had banned her for good. “Go peel stickers somewhere else, Grandma, before I have you carried out,” he’d said, with the whole checkout line watching. At six the next day she walked back there anyway, so I grabbed my shoes.
Halina has lived across the street from me for twenty-six years, and that store is the only one she can reach on foot since they took her license.
She showed me what started it at her kitchen table, still in her coat.
An index card.
Six yellow price stickers were lined up on it like stamps.
“Look at the corner,” she said.
I picked at one with my thumbnail. Under the yellow sticker was another yellow sticker, same chicken thighs, same weight, a sell-by date five days earlier.
All six were like that.
She’d peeled them off packs of chicken and pork in the meat case on Tuesday, stuck them on the card, and carried it up to the service desk like a report card.
The manager came out from the back. Thirty-something, a lanyard and a tie clip. His name tag said COLTON.
“He said I damaged merchandise,” Halina said. “He said that’s theft. He said if I set foot in there again he phones the cops, and the girl on register three laughed.”
Then he said the thing about having her carried out.
“For LIFE, Katherine. He said it like he was proud of the word.”
I was so angry I set the card down on her table so I wouldn’t bend it.
“You can’t go back there.”
“I’m eighty-one. What’s he going to do, ground me?”
That was Wednesday night.
Thursday at ten after six I was at my front window with coffee when she came down her steps carrying the canvas tote with the faded tomato painted on it.
I opened my door and called her name.
She lifted one hand without turning around and kept going.
I put on sneakers with no socks and went after her, half a block back, feeling like an idiot.
She skipped the front entrance completely.
She went around the side, past the cart corral and the recycling bins, to the back where the trucks pull in.
A delivery truck was idling at the receiving door. A young guy in a back brace was walking milk crates down the ramp two at a time.
He saw her and set the crates down.
I knew him.
Santino Galvan, from Pine Street. Ten years ago I used to see him on Halina’s porch on the first of every month, the skinniest fourteen-year-old in Altoona, and she’d pass him an envelope through the screen door.
I never asked what was in it.
“Mrs. W,” he said. “You can’t be back here. He’ll fire me. He’ll ACTUALLY fire me.”
“I know, honey.”
“He’s got your picture taped up at the registers.”
“Then I’ll be quick,” she said. “Ten minutes. And you don’t owe me a thing. I’m only asking.”
He looked up at the camera over the door.
He looked at the driver, who was on his phone in the cab.
Then he pulled the door wide and stood behind it.
I ran the last stretch and got my foot in before it shut.
Inside it was cold and loud and it smelled like bleach and wet cardboard. A long gray hallway, a walk-in cooler, a steel table with a label printer sitting on it.
That’s where Halina went.
Straight to the printer, like she’d been back there before.
Somebody started yelling before I even saw him.
“Are you SERIOUS right now?”
Colton came at us fast with a clipboard under his arm.
“I told you Tuesday. I TOLD you.”
Halina didn’t look at him. She was holding the index card up next to the roll of yellow stickers in the printer.
Same yellow. Same font. Same little star in the corner.
“Peel the top one,” she said to him. “Go on. You do it.”
The color went out of his ears first.
“Who let you in?”
Nobody answered him.
He reached past her and yanked the card out of her fingers. Two of the stickers came off on his thumb.
Halina’s hand stayed up in the air where the card had been.
I heard my own voice before I decided anything.
“That’s HERS. GIVE IT TO HER.”
Every head in that hallway swung toward me. The driver had come in behind us. Santino stood by the door with a crate against his chest.
“Santino,” Colton said, still looking at me. “Get the cops out here. Trespassing, both of them.”
Santino didn’t move.
“Did you hear me?”
Halina wasn’t watching Colton anymore.
She was watching me.
“Katherine,” she said. “Your phone. Get the printer. Get what’s loaded in it.”
Colton stepped sideways and put his whole body between me and the steel table.
“Nobody films in my back room. NOBODY. That’s company property.”
I dug my phone out of my jacket.
My hands were shaking so bad I opened the calculator first.
Colton grabbed my wrist.
And from the receiving door, behind all of us, a man said Colton’s whole name, first, middle and last, the way only one kind of person ever says it.
Colton Xavier Shapiro
Colton let go of my wrist.
He didn’t turn around. He said “Dad” to the steel table.
The man in the receiving door was somewhere past seventy, in a brown work jacket with the cuffs worn white, a ring of keys clipped to his belt and a Sheetz coffee with the lid on crooked. He had Colton’s narrow face with forty more years on it.
His father. The man whose store it was.
I closed the calculator. I found the camera and pressed the red button, and the phone shook so hard the picture was mostly ceiling tiles.
He came down the hallway slow, the way a man walks on a floor he paid for. He looked at the index card in his son’s hand. He looked at the two yellow stickers stuck to Colton’s thumb. He looked at the steel cart by the cooler door, thirty packs of chicken thighs stacked three high with fresh yellow labels on every one.
Then he looked at the printer.
Then at Halina, and he didn’t look surprised at all.
“Halina,” he said. “You told me you’d never set foot in this room again.”
Halina’s left hand
I’ve known that hand for twenty-six years.
The index finger on it stops at the first knuckle. The week I moved in across the street, twenty-six and divorced with a rented truck and no plan, Halina brought me a plate of pierogi with that hand and told me it was a car door, 1986, her own fault. I never asked again. You don’t.
Wednesday night at her table, after the thing about grounding her, she showed me how to get one of those stickers off whole.
She worked one loose from the card and laid it back down.
“You start at the star,” she said. She put her thumbnail under the corner with the little star. “The star corner never sticks down all the way. That’s where they lift it from.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve bought a lot of chicken.”
She got up to make tea and stood at the stove with her back to me.
“The truck comes Thursdays at six,” she said. “The old man still counts it himself. He never trusted anybody with a count.”
I thought she meant the store would be busy, so stay home.
Then she opened the freezer to send me home with pierogi, and behind the bag there was a red coffee can with a strip of masking tape across the lid. No writing on the tape. She moved the can, took the pierogi, and put the can back exactly where it had been, label to the wall.
I told her I’d drive her to the big store out on the highway every week for the rest of her life.
“I don’t want the big store,” she said. “I want my store.”
My store. Where her face was now taped up at the registers like a shoplifter’s, because a man with a tie clip had decided she was the problem with his meat case.
Now the old man was standing in the back hallway of it, with his coffee, looking at her.
“Twenty-one years she worked that table,” he said to nobody. “And she comes in the back like a burglar.”
There was a band saw against the far wall under a plastic cover.
Halina put her left hand in her coat pocket.
The roll in his pocket
“Colton,” his father said. “Give Mrs. Wahlberg her card.”
“Dad, she’s banned. I did it right, I’ve got it written up. She damaged—”
“Give it to her.”
Colton held the card out. He didn’t look at her. The two stickers were still on his thumb, and he wiped them off on his khakis, and they stayed there on his leg like a kid’s.
Halina took the card and held it against her coat.
“Okay,” Cecil Shapiro said. He set his coffee on the steel table next to the printer. “Nobody’s calling anybody. Santino, go finish the truck. Ladies, I’ll walk you out the front myself. I’ll take the picture down myself. Halina, you shop here any day you want. We’ve been neighbors forty years, practically.”
He said it nice. He said it the way you’d talk to a dog that got in the yard.
For about three seconds I believed him. I thought about going home to put socks on.
While he talked he flipped the lid of the printer open with one hand.
He pulled out the roll of yellow stickers, the whole roll, and dropped it in his jacket pocket.
“Thing jams,” he said. “I keep telling him.”
I held the phone up higher. “I’ve got that.”
“You’ve got a man changing labels in his own store.” He smiled at me. “Post it. My granddaughter can show me how to watch it.”
The driver held his clipboard out to Cecil like none of this was happening.
“Cec. I got Hollidaysburg at seven.”
Cecil signed it against the wall without looking.
“I didn’t see nothing, Cec,” he said. “I’m in the truck.”
He went out.
Santino still hadn’t moved. He was standing by the receiving door with the crate against his chest, and his eyes were on the steel cart.
Cecil walked to the other end of the hallway, to the swinging door with the round window that let out by the dairy case. He pushed it open. The store’s music came in, some song from when I was in high school.
“After you, ladies,” he said.
Pine Street, 2016
Nobody went.
Santino set the crate down on the floor, very carefully, the way you’d set down something that might go off.
“My mom stood at that table,” he said.
“Santino.”
“Anika Galvan. You remember her, Mr. Shapiro? She did six years in meat. She was the one who always gave me the end pieces of the bologna.”
Cecil let the door swing shut.
“The state man came in the spring I was fourteen,” Santino said. “He found pork with two dates on it. Two stickers. You told him she did it on her own. You had her sign a paper.”
“She signed it because she did it.”
“She signed it because you said if she didn’t, you’d fight her unemployment.” He wasn’t loud. He was talking like he’d practiced it in a car. “Then you fought it anyway.”
The spring he was fourteen.
The first time I saw that kid on Halina’s porch was the first of June that year. I was rolling my trash cans down to the curb. He was standing on her mat in somebody’s old Pirates shirt, and she opened the screen door about six inches and put an envelope in his hand, and he ran.
Every first of the month after that, for a year.
Colton was looking at his father now.
“Dad. Everybody stars the Thursday stuff. You showed me the star my first week. You said that’s how it’s always been done back here.”
“Colton, shut up.”
“You said Grandpa did it.”
“I said shut up.”
Halina was looking at Santino the way you’d look at a kid on a high dive.
Cecil picked his coffee back up and drank some of it. His hand was fine. Steady as anything.
“Santino,” he said. “You’re on the clock. Call it in, or punch out.”
The coffee can
Halina took her hand out of her pocket.
She reached into the tomato tote, the one I’d thought was empty all this time, and she came out with an envelope.
A bank envelope, the long kind, gone soft as a dish towel, with frost marks on it.
There was writing on the front in blue ballpoint. I could read it from where I stood. H. For your years. C. And under that, $4,200, with the cents written in small.
She held it up beside his face the way she’d held the card up beside the printer.
“March of ninety-nine,” she said. “You started the star that winter. I told you I’d call the state. You drove to my house on a Sunday after church with this in your coat.”
“That was severance, Halina.”
“You said, and we don’t talk about the back room.”
Cecil didn’t say anything to that.
“I put it in my freezer,” Halina said. “In a coffee can. I couldn’t spend it, and I couldn’t give it back, because giving it back I’d have had to say why.” She turned the envelope over. Empty. “Seventeen years it sat behind my pierogi.”
“Nobody made you take it.”
“Then you did Anika.”
She looked at Santino.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. “First of every month. Twelve months. That’s your forty-two hundred, Cecil. I didn’t keep a dollar of it.”
Santino’s face did something I don’t have a word for. He was twenty-four and six foot and wearing a back brace, and for a second he was the skinniest fourteen-year-old in Altoona again, standing on her mat.
“My mom said you won it at bingo,” he said.
“I’ve never won at bingo in my life.”
“She said you won big that one time, and you didn’t need it, and you’d be insulted if she didn’t take it.”
“That part was true.”
Cecil put his coffee down again.
“You took the money, Halina,” he said. “Whatever you did with it after. You took it, and you went home, and you kept your mouth shut for twenty-seven years. So don’t stand in my hallway with that face.”
“I know what I did,” she said. “That’s why I’m in your hallway.”
She held the envelope out to him.
He didn’t take it. Colton did.
Colton turned it over in his hands and read the front. He read it again.
His lips moved on the C.
The cart by the walk-in
“Okay,” Cecil said. “Okay. So what is this. A shakedown? Twenty-seven years later?”
Nobody answered him.
“You want another envelope, Halina? Is that it? I’ll write you a check right now, I’ve got the book in the truck. Name a number. I’m not doing this with the help standing here.”
“I don’t want a number.”
“Everybody wants a number.” He turned to me. “You. Easley, right? You’re on my camera coming through a door you’ve got no business at. You want to talk about a number, we can talk about what a lawyer costs.”
I didn’t say anything. I kept the phone up.
“And look at what you’ve got. An old envelope. Nobody’s going to look at an envelope from ninety-nine. The roll’s in my pocket. You’ve got a confused old woman with an index card full of stickers she peeled off my meat, which is damaging merchandise, which my son was right about, by the way. He did that right.” He pointed at Santino with his chin. “And you’re done. Take your brace off my crate and go.”
“Dad,” Colton said. “The star. You told me—”
“I told you nothing.” Cecil turned on him. “Whose name is on the Thursday schedule? Yours. Whose initials are on the label log? Yours. I haven’t touched that printer in ten years. I’m a retired man who comes in to count a truck.”
Colton stood there holding the envelope.
“Get the cops on the phone, Colton,” his father said. “Trespass. Both of them. Now.”
Colton took out his phone. He dialed. He looked at his father the whole time it rang, and he didn’t look away when somebody answered.
I walked to the cart by the walk-in.
Nobody stopped me. Cecil was between me and the printer, guarding a machine with nothing in it.
I moved the phone to my left hand and pointed it down at the top pack of chicken thighs. Under the fluorescent tubes the yellow label was so bright it looked wet.
I found the star.
I put my thumbnail under that corner, the way she’d shown me at her table, and the sticker came up whole. Under it was another yellow sticker. Same thighs. Same weight. A date from the Saturday before.
I held it up to the camera.
Then the next pack.
“Put that down,” Cecil said. “That’s merchandise. Colton, you seeing this? That’s theft.”
The next pack. And the next. I did eleven, and every one of them had a Saturday under it, and I stuck them to the steel edge of the cart in a row so the phone could see them all at once.
The police came in eighteen minutes. One officer, a young woman, and Cecil talked to her for most of the first ten. Trespass. Damage. Harassment. He said harassment three times.
When she got to me, I said one thing.
“I pushed the door after the truck. Nobody let me in.”
Santino looked at me across the hallway.
“Camera’ll show the kid opened it,” Cecil said.
“Then you can bring that to the magistrate, sir,” the officer said.
She wrote me a citation for defiant trespass. Katherine Easley, my address, my date of birth, my signature at the bottom in handwriting I didn’t recognize.
“Write me one too,” Halina said. “I’m the one who came.”
“Ma’am, go home,” the officer said.
At the curb, before I put my phone away, I sent the video to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s food safety complaint form. Name, address, phone number. Every box.
Santino held the receiving door for us. Then he unbuckled his back brace and left it on the crate.
Thursday, ten after six
The citation came to two hundred and twelve dollars with costs. I paid it at the magistrate’s window on a Monday, and they gave me a receipt on pink paper. It’s on my refrigerator.
The state sent me a letter in November. An inspection had been done. Violations were noted. A follow-up was scheduled. That’s all it said.
Santino eats at Halina’s on Wednesdays now. He told us my picture is up at register three, next to hers.
Thursday at ten after six I was at my front window with coffee when she came down her steps with the canvas tote with the faded tomato painted on it.
I was already wearing socks. The car was warm at the curb.
It’s sixteen minutes to the big store on the highway. Halina didn’t say anything the whole way. At the meat case she picked up a pack of chicken thighs and put her thumbnail at the corner of the label, and it didn’t come up, because there was nothing under it.
She handed it to me.
“Look at the corner,” she said.
I looked. One date.
She put it in the tote and went to find the pork.
If you’ve got a neighbor who still reads every label, walk with her some Thursday morning.
For more stories of loyalty and family ties tested, read the husband who sent one last message and the daughter whose calls went unanswered. And for a sharp turn from heartbreak to payback, there’s the date who brought her ex a present.
