My granddaughter was home with a fever of 102 when some lady in a cream wool coat raked all eleven marked-down bottles of children’s fever syrup into her basket. I held out six dollars for one, and she said, “Maybe plan better next time, sweetheart.” Then the speaker in the ceiling said her name.
Ada is six, and she’d been sick since four that afternoon.
I’ve had her since she was two. Her mother isn’t in the picture, and I’m seventy-three, and some months it’s the rent or the light bill, never both.
I left her with the neighbor and drove to the big grocery on Pershing Road in Decatur, because its pharmacy closes at nine and it was 8:41.
The syrup was on an end shelf by the counter with yellow tags. $3.79 a bottle.
The same bottle one shelf over, in the new box, was $14.29.
That’s the whole reason they were cheap. A new box.
I had $6.20 in my coat pocket and a debit card I didn’t trust.
A woman beat me there by maybe ten seconds.
Cream coat to the knee. Pearl earrings. A wire basket hooked on her arm like a purse.
She didn’t pick one up and read the dosage the way a mother does.
She swept them. Forearm flat, shelf to basket, like clearing crumbs off a table.
Eleven bottles.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could I have one of those?”
She didn’t look up. “They’re for my daughter’s daycare co-op. We stock up when it’s cheap.”
“My granddaughter’s at 102. I’ve got six dollars on me.”
That’s when she looked at me. Down at me, really, because she wore heels and I’m barely five foot.
“So get the full-price one.”
“It’s fourteen dollars. I can’t.”
She moved the basket to her other arm, away from my side.
The pharmacist leaned over his counter. Young, maybe thirty, a lanyard covered in little enamel frog pins.
“Ma’am, we can put a limit on those if you’d let me…”
“You can’t limit anything,” she said. “There’s no sign.”
There wasn’t. I checked.
By then a man in a hockey jersey had stopped his cart behind me. A woman holding a carton of eggs had her phone halfway up.
I took the bills out and held them toward her. Folded twice.
My hand was shaking. I hated that it was shaking.
“Please. All of it, for one bottle.”
She laughed. Quiet. That was the worst part.
She tapped the bills with one long fingernail and said, “Maybe plan better next time, sweetheart.”
The egg woman said, “Are you SERIOUS right now?”
“Completely.” She hitched the basket higher. “And before anybody gets brave, my husband’s people built half this town. Think about whose face you’re filming.”
Then she turned and clicked off toward the registers on that clean white floor.
I stood there holding six dollars.
The pharmacist said, “Ma’am?” and I didn’t answer him. I was doing the math on the debit card again, and the math hadn’t changed.
The ceiling clicked.
The music stopped.
“Tameka Cartwright.”
An old man’s voice. Slow, with gravel in it, like somebody woken from a nap in a recliner.
Her heels quit so hard one bottle hopped out of her basket and rolled under the greeting cards.
Nobody in that store was shopping anymore.
“You have eleven bottles of fever medicine for little ones on your arm,” the voice said. “I counted them on camera nine. Twice.”
Her free hand went flat against her coat, right over her stomach.
“Lester?” she said. Not loud enough for any speaker to hear.
The man in the hockey jersey said, “Who the HELL is Lester?”
Nobody answered him.
“PUT EVERY BOTTLE BACK,” the voice said. “On that shelf. Then go stand next to the lady in the red coat, and don’t you say one word to her.”
Tameka didn’t move.
“I said NOW, Tameka.”
She came back slower. The heels didn’t click the same.
She set the whole basket on the shelf like that would count, and the voice laughed once, short, out of every speaker in the building.
“Out of the basket. ONE at a time.”
She did it.
I counted along with her under my breath, and I’m not proud of that.
Ten. Then the one from under the greeting cards, which the pharmacist fished out and handed her without a word.
Eleven.
Her mascara had started to go.
I reached for a bottle. I still had my six dollars in my other hand.
Then the ceiling clicked again, and this time it said MY name.
“Nanette Macdonald. Stay right where you are, please. I’m coming down.”
I have never once used a card in that store. I pay cash. Nobody in this town knows my last name except my landlord.
Tameka turned and looked at me like I was the one who’d done something.
“How does he KNOW you?” she said.
I didn’t have an answer.
Up above the dairy case, the blinds on the office window rattled up.
An old man in a gray cardigan stood there with one hand on the glass, already looking straight down at me.
I knew that face.
I hadn’t seen it since the night I left home in 1989 with a suitcase and somebody else’s ring in my pocket.
Camera nine
The man behind the glass was Lester Cartwright.
In 1989 I was supposed to marry him on the second Saturday in June. The ring in my pocket the night I left was his mother’s. He put it on my finger at his kitchen table, and I never gave it back.
Tameka was still staring at me.
“I asked you a question,” she said.
I folded my six dollars one more time and put them back in my coat. Then I took the bottle closest to me off the shelf and held on to it.
“He was going to be my husband,” I said.
Up in the window, Lester took his hand off the glass. The blinds came down.
Tameka’s mouth opened and stayed that way. Her eyes went to the collar of my blouse, where a thin gold chain goes down under the top button.
The pharmacist looked at the chain too. Then he looked at his register like it might know something.
The egg woman lowered her phone a couple of inches. The man in the hockey jersey leaned on his cart handle.
Somewhere behind the dairy case a door banged, and feet started on a staircase. Slow ones.
Tameka put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re Nan.”
The kitchen on Edward Street
Lester counted money twice. Every dollar of it.
He’d count the change from my grocery trips on his kitchen table with a pencil behind his ear, and then count it again, and if the second count came out different he’d start over at zero.
I was thirty-six. He was forty-one, a widower with a store on Pershing Road and a fifteen-year-old named Alvin who ate his supper without looking up.
Sunday nights he had me read the week’s receipts out loud at that table. Item and price. Alvin had to sit there for it.
The ring was small. Gold, with a chip of a stone you had to tilt toward the lamp to find.
The last night, my change from the grocery came up forty cents short. Lester emptied my purse onto the oilcloth. A lipstick, a comb, a bus transfer, a button off a coat I no longer owned. He pushed the pennies around with one finger, twice, while Alvin held his fork in the air.
“Forty cents, Nan,” he said. “Where’d it go?”
I’d bought a pack of gum. That’s where it went.
I packed the suitcase after he went to bed. I meant to leave the ring on the table next to his reading glasses. I had it off my finger. Then the bed creaked upstairs and I put it in my pocket and went out the back door.
I meant to mail it back. For a while I meant to mail it every week.
Then I put it on a chain, and it’s been on a chain since.
I’ve had months where the light bill sat on the fridge under a magnet for three weeks. That ring would have paid it. Any pawn shop in Peoria would have bought it. I kept it through every one of those months, even the ones I couldn’t pay. Selling it would have meant it was mine.
Ada calls it my button. When she can’t sleep she holds it between two fingers and turns it until she’s out.
I came back to Decatur four years ago, when Ada’s mother left her with me and I needed to be close to Ada’s school. I found the apartment on an index card pinned to this store’s corkboard by the front doors. Two bedrooms on Water Street. Seniors and children welcome. Four hundred and ten a month.
I signed the lease at a little office out on the edge of town, with a girl who chewed ice the whole time.
Every month I buy a money order and mail it to P.P. Holdings at a post office box. The rent has never gone up. Not one dollar in four years.
I used to think of it as the one lucky thing I had.
The steel door at the bottom of the staircase swung open.
The stairs by the dairy case
He came out slow, one hand on the rail. Gray cardigan, buttoned wrong by one hole. Still tall, though he’d folded some.
The man in the hockey jersey started clapping. Two or three people joined in. The egg woman turned her phone to get him coming up the aisle.
Lester lifted one hand, and the clapping stopped.
He didn’t look at Tameka. He looked at me, and then at the bottle in my hand.
“Nan,” he said.
“Lester.”
“You cut your hair.”
Thirty-seven years, and that’s what he had.
Tameka said, “The one with the ring. Alvin still talks about you at Thanksgiving. The lady who ran off with his grandmother’s ring and the grocery money.”
“Tameka,” Lester said, and she quit talking like he’d pulled a cord.
He turned to the pharmacist. “Bag all eleven for Mrs. Macdonald. Put them on the house.”
“One bottle will do,” I said.
“You’ve got a sick girl at home. Take them all.”
The pharmacist reached for a bag. He was looking at me, not Lester, and he stopped with the bag half open.
I set my bottle on the counter and took my six dollars out again. “Ring up the one, please.”
Lester put two fingers on top of my bills. Not on my hand. On the money.
“Her money’s no good here, son.”
The man in the hockey jersey said, “Lady, the man’s giving you free medicine. Take the free medicine.”
Tameka made a sound through her nose. “Oh, she’ll take it. Look at her coat.”
Lester slid my six dollars back across the counter to me, with the same two fingers.
“You still buy the dented peaches on Tuesdays,” he said. “Aisle six, about eight-thirty. Two cans, sometimes three.”
Water Street
I’ve never said more than “paper’s fine” to anybody in that store.
“I watch the cameras,” he said, like I’d asked. “Not much else to do up there.”
Tameka laughed, once, high. “He watches everybody. He watches Alvin park.”
Lester talked right over her. “How’s the furnace on Water Street? I had the man out in October. He said the pilot was sooty.”
A man did come in October. I let him in myself. He had a clipboard and said the landlord sent him.
I hadn’t told anybody my address. Not in this store. Not in this town, except the girl with the ice and a post office box.
“P.P. Holdings,” I said.
“Pershing Property,” Lester said. “My lawyer liked initials.”
Tameka turned all the way around on her heels. “You’re her LANDLORD?”
“Four hundred and ten a month,” he said. “Four years. You know what a two-bedroom on Water Street goes for, Nan?”
I knew. I’d looked, that first year, because I didn’t trust it. I saw seven-fifty in the paper and closed the paper.
“I pinned that card up myself,” he said. “Saw you on camera four the week you got back to town. You read every card on that board twice before you took one down. I knew you by how you stood.”
The egg woman’s phone was still up. Her other hand had come down off her mouth.
“You could have said something,” I said.
“I’m saying it now.”
Tameka said, “Four years? Alvin asked you for help with the boat payment and you made him write it up like a loan.”
Lester didn’t even turn his head. He was looking at the chain at my collar.
“I’ve been carrying you four years, Nan,” he said. “I’d call us about even on the forty cents.”
Register tape
He reached into the cardigan and came out with a sheet of paper folded in quarters. Register tape, stapled to printer paper.
I knew what it was before he opened it. I’d read a hundred of them out loud at his table.
“Last Tuesday,” he said.
He read it to the store.
“Peaches, dented, two cans. Bread, day-old. Store oatmeal. Children’s vitamins, the gummy kind.” He looked at me over his glasses. “Forty-one cents short at register three. Minh let it go. I didn’t fire him for it.”
The man in the hockey jersey had quit smiling.
“Sir, that’s enough,” the pharmacist said.
Lester turned the page.
There was a second sheet stapled under mine. Block capitals across the top, his handwriting, the same capitals that used to be on the grocery list stuck to his fridge. CARTWRIGHT, T.
Tameka saw it. She went very still.
“Tonight, 8:39,” Lester read. “Eleven bottles, children’s fever, charged to the house account.” He folded it shut. “The house account I pay, Tameka. For a daycare co-op that closed in August.”
“That isn’t…” she said.
“It closed in August.” He tapped the paper on the counter, twice. “I didn’t make you put those back for her. I made you put them back because they were going on my bill.”
Nobody moved. The music was still off.
He turned back to me.
“I called your name so you’d come stand still a minute,” he said. “Four years I’ve watched you count your change at register three. I wanted you to see what I do for the people I look after.”
He held out his hand, palm up, toward my collar.
“Every bottle on that shelf is mine, Nan. So’s the apartment. So’s that ring.”
The frog pins
He talked, and I let him.
“Here’s what happens,” he said. “Rent stays at four-ten. For good. I open a house account for the little girl’s medicine, her shoes, whatever she needs. You come up the stairs Sundays and have supper at Edward Street. Alvin will be there. Tameka will be there, and she’ll be polite to you.”
Tameka didn’t say anything to that.
“You’ll want for nothing,” he said. “You’ll just keep the receipts. Same as before. That’s all I ever asked anybody.”
“Lady, that’s a good deal,” the man in the hockey jersey said, but quieter now.
“It’s a good deal,” Lester said. “She knows it’s a good deal. Look at her, she’s doing the math.”
I was. The math hadn’t changed.
Tameka leaned in close to me, so close I could smell her perfume, something with oranges in it.
“Don’t go up those stairs,” she said. Low, for me. “Alvin’s fifty-two years old and he still reads his receipts to that man on Sundays. I read mine after him.”
She straightened up and fixed one earring, like none of that had come out of her.
Lester was still holding his hand out.
I reached behind my neck and found the clasp. It took me three tries. My fingers aren’t what they were.
The chain came loose. I slid the ring off it and set it on top of his register tape, right on my last Tuesday.
Then I put my six dollars on the counter beside it and pushed them to the pharmacist.
“One bottle,” I said.
He looked at Lester. Then he took the money and rang it up.
“Three eighty-three with tax, ma’am.”
He counted my change into my palm. Two dollars and seventeen cents. I counted it once and put it in my coat.
“Nan, pick that up,” Lester said. “That’s my mother’s ring. You don’t leave my mother’s ring on a counter.”
“It’s yours,” I said.
“You walk out that door, the four-ten’s gone. You hear me? I’ll have that lease looked at by Monday. You’ll be paying what everybody pays, or you’ll be out on Water Street with a six-year-old in January.”
“I’ll be out by the first,” I said.
“Where? On what?” His voice went up, and it sounded smaller down here than it had out of the ceiling. “You came in here with six dollars, Nan. Where are you going to go on six dollars?”
I picked up my bag with the bottle in it.
“Two seventeen,” I said.
Eldorado Street, January
The new place is a one-bedroom on the east side, over a tax preparer’s. Five hundred and eighty-five a month. Ada’s bed is in the living room by the radiator, and I sleep on the pull-out when she has a bad night.
The light bill is on the fridge under a magnet. I’ll pay it Friday.
The first week, Ada reached for my collar at bedtime and found nothing there. She felt around for it. Then she took hold of my thumb instead and turned that, until she was out.
Last Tuesday she had a cough, and I stopped at the drugstore on Eldorado on the way home.
The children’s syrup was on an end shelf with yellow tags on it. Somebody had moved the bottles around, the way people do.
I picked one up and read the dosage, all the way down to the bottom, before I put it in my basket.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s ever stood at a counter counting out the last of what they had.
For more family secrets and unsettling twists, read about the insulin delivery that uncovered a husband’s disappearance, a mother-in-law’s strange request for the twins’ birth certificates, and the man who denied knowing her mother – until he called her Caro.
