The pharmacy manager pulled a sheet of gold star stickers out of an old lady’s coat pocket and said, “Ma’am, maybe the police can jog your memory.” Two women by the register raised their phones. She caught my sleeve and said, “Please don’t let the kids hear about this.” I had no idea yet what she stood to lose.
The kids.
I figured she meant grandkids somewhere.
But she kept looking past me at the automatic doors, like a whole class might file in behind a teacher any second.
I was third in line in a pharmacy in Dayton with my blood pressure pills and a bag of cough drops. I hadn’t eaten since the night before and I was in no mood for anybody.
She’d paid for her prescription already. The white bag sat stapled shut beside the register with the receipt clipped to the top.
The stickers were the whole case. ONE sheet of foil stars, still in the plastic, $2.29, found in the pocket of a gray wool coat somebody had mended at the elbow.
“I don’t know how they got in there,” she said.
“Funny how that works,” the manager said.
He was maybe thirty-five, lanyard, pressed polo, a man who liked an audience.
“Gio, she paid for everything else,” the cashier said. Her tag said Josie and she looked about nineteen.
“Not for THESE she didn’t.”
He held the stickers over his head so the back of the line could see them too.
The woman behind me already had her camera going. Her friend leaned around her to get a better angle.
Somebody over by the greeting cards laughed.
The old lady had quit trying to explain. Now it was only sorry, sorry, sorry, while she folded the top of her prescription bag down again and again until the paper went soft.
I’d been on the other side of that sorry.
I used to make people say it.
People see me coming and step off the sidewalk. I’m six-four, I’m heavy, and there’s ink across my knuckles that I picked out at twenty-two, back when I figured I’d never need to shake anybody’s hand. I did six years for something I won’t make sound better than it was.
So I don’t step into things anymore.
I stepped into this one.
“Ring them up with mine,” I said, and set my pills and the cough drops down next to her stars.
The bottle landed harder than I meant. She jumped. I took a full step back and put both hands in my jacket pockets.
The manager’s eyes went to my knuckles and stayed there a while.
“Sir, this is a store matter.”
“It’s TWO DOLLARS and twenty-nine cents. You made it everybody’s matter.”
“I can have an officer here in ten minutes.”
“Sure. And Josie can ring up the stickers while we stand around.”
Josie looked at him. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no.
Nobody got loud. That seemed to disappoint people.
A man with a pack of paper towels actually edged around the end cap for a better look.
He could look all he wanted.
Josie came around with the stool she keeps behind the register and asked the lady if she wanted to sit. I moved out of the way so she wouldn’t have to squeeze past me.
She sat with her knees together and her purse in her lap. Brown shoes, double-knotted, the way you tie them on somebody who keeps tripping.
The cough drops were cherry. I hate cherry. They were just what was at eye level.
“Who drove you here today?” I said.
“My daughter. Margo. She waits in the car with the heater on, her knees are bad.”
“Okay. We’ll hang on till Margo comes looking.”
That helped for about four seconds. Then she looked at the phones again.
“Will it go on the computer?” she said.
“Maybe. Why?”
“I read on Wednesdays. At the library, to the little ones. Twenty-three years.” Her hands went still on the bag. “The stars are for the ones who sit through the whole book. If their mothers see me on there, they’ll NEVER let me near them again.”
There it was.
She wasn’t scared of the cops.
She was scared of losing a carpet full of four-year-olds every Wednesday at ten.
I turned around to the woman filming. “Ma’am. Shut it off.”
“It’s a free country,” she said.
“It is. She’s also somebody’s mother.”
She dropped the phone to her hip. No way to know if the red dot was still going.
Josie rang up the stars, my pills, the cherry drops. I paid cash. The manager walked off toward the stockroom without another word, and I’ll be honest, I was glad he went, because I could feel the old shit waking up in my hands.
I set the sheet of stars on top of her purse.
She didn’t pick them up. She was studying me instead, the way you look at a word you used to know how to spell.
Then she tapped the edge of the register twice with one finger.
Tap, tap.
The back of my neck went cold.
“You look peaked,” she said. “Have you had anything at all today?”
NOBODY asks me that.
She peeled one star off the sheet and pressed it onto the back of my hand, right over the ink.
“YOU STILL SKIP BREAKFAST, don’t you, Tuan.”
Nobody in that store knew my name.
Room 114
“Mrs. Kane,” I said.
I hadn’t said those two words out loud in thirty-nine years. They came out the way twenty-six kids used to drag them when she walked in with her coffee.
She was my fourth-grade teacher. Room 114, east side of Dayton, 1987. I sat in the desk by the radiator that banged all winter.
Two taps on the corner of your desk was how she told you to look inside it without telling the whole room.
I looked down at my hand. The star sat on the second knuckle, right on top of a letter I paid forty dollars for.
“You got big,” she said.
“I got a lot of things.”
Josie had stopped with my change still in her fingers. The clock over the photo counter said 10:22. The woman with the phone had it back up, lower, like that made a difference.
“You two know each other?” Josie said.
“He sat by the radiator,” Mrs. Kane said. “He read everything on the walls and nothing in the book.”
The automatic doors opened. A woman in a quilted vest came in walking stiff, one hand out for the rack of reading glasses. Fifties. Same chin.
She looked at her mother on the stool. Then at me, standing over her. Then at the phone pointed at both of us.
“Mom,” Margo said. “What did he do to you?”
The saltines
Fair question. I’d have asked it too.
“He bought my stars,” Mrs. Kane said. “Sit down, your knees.”
Margo didn’t sit. She took the prescription bag off the counter and held it against her vest and kept her eyes on my hands the whole time.
I let her. I was back in Room 114 anyway.
My father drove a bread truck nights for a bakery out on Route 4. He slept days. My mother was in Columbus with somebody, and our kitchen held what he remembered to buy on Sundays, which by Wednesday was ketchup and a box of baking soda.
I didn’t tell anybody. At nine you think being hungry is something you did wrong.
Mrs. Kane figured it out the second week of September. I never asked how. One morning during spelling she walked down my row, and her knuckle went tap, tap on the corner of my desk, and she kept walking.
Inside, on top of my workbook, a sleeve of saltines and a packet of peanut butter, the little kind from the cafeteria.
Every school day after that. Tap, tap. She never said one word about it. If another kid saw, she said she was checking for gum.
She kept paper the way some people keep cats. Lunch money in labeled envelopes. Permission slips clipped in a drawer she locked. Every note a mother ever sent in, filed by last name. If you lost your field trip form she could tell you the day you turned it in.
And she kept a chart by the door. A column for every kid. You got a gold star for sitting through the whole read-aloud without getting up.
I couldn’t sit through anything. My first star came the week before Thanksgiving. I’d eaten before ten every day for two months by then, and I think that’s the only reason I could hold still.
I moved to my aunt’s in Kettering that summer. After that it’s a different story, and not a good one, and it ends with ink on my knuckles and six years of my life handed to the state of Ohio.
Josie pushed my change across the counter. Margo wrote a phone number on the back of my receipt because her mother told her to, and she didn’t look happy about it.
“So you can tell me if you eat,” Mrs. Kane said.
Margo walked her out with one hand under her elbow. I went out after them, slow, so nobody would think I was following.
Gio came back out of the stockroom with a clipboard and stood by the doors until I was gone.
Chiara Vermeulen
The video went up that night.
A guy I know sent it to me at 6:40 the next morning with three question marks. Forty-one thousand views. The woman behind me had cut it short. It started with Gio holding the stars over his head and ended with me setting my pills down hard and her jumping.
The caption on it said Grandma caught stealing at Dayton pharmacy then her thug shows up to scare the manager.
The part where I stepped back with my hands in my pockets wasn’t in it. The stool wasn’t in it. Mrs. Kane saying my name wasn’t in it.
I read the comments. I shouldn’t have. Somebody had already found the pharmacy on a map.
At 9:40 my phone rang. A number I didn’t have saved, because I’d only written it on a receipt.
“This is Margo Kane.”
“Is she all right?”
“A woman named Chiara Vermeulen called at eight. She runs the children’s programs at the library.” Margo stopped like she was reading it off something. “Story hour is on pause while they look into a concern. Two mothers sent her the link.”
“Look into what? She didn’t do anything.”
“Did you see the video?”
“I’m in it.”
“Then you know what it looks like.” She breathed out. “Twenty-three years. She’s never missed a Wednesday except when Dad died, and she went the week after anyway.”
“What do you need from me?”
“I don’t know yet. I didn’t call for anything. She asked me to call.”
“Put her on.”
“She won’t come to the phone.” Margo’s voice dropped. “She’s been at the kitchen table since eight. It’s almost ten. She’s still got her coat on.”
The camera over register two
I went back to the pharmacy Friday morning.
I had a plan, and it was a stupid one. The store has cameras everywhere. Their footage would show the whole thing, not the forty seconds that woman kept. Me stepping back. Josie bringing the stool. An old lady who didn’t know where she was, not a thief.
Gio was at the front end restocking batteries.
“I’d like to ask about your security footage,” I said. “From Tuesday.”
He didn’t turn around for a while. When he did, he had the clipboard again.
“Footage goes to law enforcement with a report number. That’s policy. You got a report number?”
“No.”
“Then no.” He hung a card of double-As. “Funny you came back, though. I ran your name. Tuan Conley. You’ve got a lot of name.”
“I’m here about her.”
“She’s on our loss report now. That’s filed with district. Two-twenty-nine or two hundred, it’s the same box on the form.” He tapped the clipboard. “And you came in and put your hands on my counter in a way my customers found threatening. I have that on camera too. You want footage? That’s the footage.”
“I want them to see I backed up.”
“Sir, I can fill out a trespass notice right now and you can get your pills at the Walgreens on Wilmington. Your choice.”
So that was the first fix, and it backfired. Now he knew where I bought my blood pressure pills.
I went out to the truck and sat there with the engine off.
Somebody knocked on my window. Josie, in a puffy coat over her work polo, a vape in her hand she was trying to hide.
“I’m on break,” she said, like I’d asked. “Don’t tell Gio I talked to you.”
“Okay.”
“That lady’s in here every Tuesday. Mrs. Kane. She gets her pills at the back counter from Ramesh, he’s the pharmacist. And she buys a sheet of those stars every single week. Two years I’ve worked here, every Tuesday.”
“From you?”
“From Ramesh. He rings them with the prescription so she doesn’t have to stand in two lines.” She looked back at the store. “I told Gio that Tuesday afternoon. He said Ramesh isn’t supposed to ring front-end stuff at the pharmacy register, and that’s a whole other problem.”
“Did she pay back there this time?”
“I don’t know,” Josie said. “I only know she always does.”
The stapled bag
Saturday Margo let me in the side door of a brick ranch two streets from the library.
She didn’t say hello. She said, “She’s had a bad week,” and stood between me and the kitchen for a second before she moved.
Mrs. Kane was at the table in a cardigan. There was a stack of picture books by her elbow with a rubber band around it. On top of the stack was the sheet of stars I’d paid for, still in the plastic.
“You came,” she said. “Sit. Have you eaten?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at me over her glasses until I said, “No, ma’am.”
Margo put a plate of toast in front of me without being asked. I ate it. It was the first thing I’d done right all week.
“Where’s the bag from Tuesday?” I said. “The prescription.”
“Why?” Margo said.
“The receipt.”
Mrs. Kane pointed without looking. It was on the counter by the bread box, still stapled shut. The receipt was still clipped to the top. Nobody had opened it, because she had a week’s worth of pills left from the old bottle, and because nobody in that house had wanted to touch anything from that store.
Margo brought it over and slid the clip off. She held the receipt so I couldn’t see the name of the medicine, which was fair.
“Just the bottom,” I said.
She read it to herself first. Then she put it on the table and turned it around.
Under the copay, one more line.
FOIL STAR STKR GOLD … 2.29
Then the total. Then the card she paid with, last four digits. Then the bottom line, small.
PHARMACY REG 1 · 10:14 AM
The clock over the photo counter had said 10:22 when Josie stopped with my change. Gio had pulled the stars out of her pocket before that.
“She paid,” Margo said. Her finger was on the line. “Mom. You paid for them.”
Mrs. Kane picked up the receipt and held it close to her face. She didn’t say anything for a while.
“I put them in my pocket so I’d have a hand for the rail,” she said. “There’s a little step down from the pharmacy. I always do that.” She set it down. “I didn’t remember. He was holding them up and I couldn’t remember.”
Two sheets of gold stars sat on that table. She had bought one of them. I had bought the same one again.
Margo was already crying, quiet, with her back to us at the sink.
Mrs. Kane tapped the receipt twice with one finger.
“The store keeps a copy,” she said. “They always keep a copy.”
Monday, register two
I went in Monday at ten with a photocopy. The original stayed in a manila envelope on Mrs. Kane’s table with her name on the front in her handwriting.
Josie was on register two. Gio came out of the back before I got to the counter. He’d seen my truck.
I put the copy down and didn’t say anything.
He read it. He didn’t pick it up.
“Okay,” Gio said. “Yeah. I know.”
“You know.”
“I pulled the journal Tuesday at one o’clock. Pharmacy rang it at 10:14. I know she paid.” He folded his arms over the lanyard. “You want to know what else I know? The loss report went to district at 11:30. A correction on a filed stop is a write-up with my name on it. And the pharmacy ringing front-end merchandise is a write-up with Ramesh’s name on it. So that’s two write-ups to fix a two-dollar sticker for a lady who’ll forget it happened by Christmas.”
“She hasn’t forgotten.”
“That’s not my department.” He took a folded form out of his back pocket. It was filled in already. My name was printed at the top in block letters. “This is, though. Notice of trespass. You came back three times after you were asked to leave.”
“Twice.”
“Twice is plenty. Sign or don’t, it’s valid either way. If you come on the property again, I call it in, and with your record they’ll come quick.”
“I need a letter,” I said. “On your paper. That she paid.”
“I’m not writing anybody a letter.” He was getting louder now, and the line was turning around to look. Same as Tuesday. He liked that part. “You don’t run anything in here. You don’t get to walk in with your hands and tell me what goes on my paper. I’ve got a camera on you right now.”
Josie had her register drawer open. She pushed some keys. The little printer under the counter started going.
“Josie,” Gio said.
She tore off the slip. It was the same transaction, reprinted, with the store number at the top and REPRINT across it. She turned it over, wrote her full name on the back, her employee number, and Mrs. Kane pays every Tuesday. Two years I’ve seen it.
“You sign that,” Gio said, “you can clock out for good. I mean it. Today.”
She signed it. She slid it across to me. Then she took her lanyard off and put it on the counter next to the trespass form.
The pharmacist came up the aisle from the back, a short man in a white coat with a pen behind his ear. Ramesh. He’d heard enough of it from his window.
“I rang it,” he said to Gio. “Write me up. I’ll sign for that too.”
Gio looked at the two of them. Then at the line. Then at me.
“Get off my property,” he said.
I took the form and Josie’s slip, and I went.
On Tuesday I took both to the library. Chiara Vermeulen was younger than I figured. She read the reprint, then the back of it, then the copy of the receipt, then she looked up at me the way everybody does.
“You’re the man in the video,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you a relative?”
“No. She was my teacher in 1987. I did six years at Lebanon Correctional for robbery. You can look it up. She paid for the stickers.”
Chiara picked up the phone on her desk before I’d left the room.
“Mrs. Kane? It’s Chiara. Can you come in tomorrow at ten?”
Wednesday at ten
The chairs in the children’s room are about a foot off the floor. I sat on one in the back corner with my knees up near my chest.
Two of the mothers by the wall kept looking at my hands. I kept them in my lap and let them look.
My blood pressure pills come from a pharmacy out by the airport now. It’s twenty-five minutes each way. Josie works the deli at a grocery store on Far Hills and says the hours are better. Ramesh got his write-up. Gio still has a job, as far as I know.
There were fourteen kids on the carpet. Mrs. Kane read a book about a bear who couldn’t find his hat. Four of them got up in the middle. Ten didn’t.
When it was done she stood and held up the sheet of gold stars, high, so the back row could see it.
The ten lined up. She gave every one of them a star, on the back of the hand, and she said each name.
Then she came down the side of the room, slow, holding the shelves. She stopped at my chair and tapped the back of it twice.
I took the sleeve of saltines out of my jacket and put it on her purse.
“Did you eat?” she said.
I held up the cough drops. Cherry.
“Those don’t count,” Mrs. Kane said, and she peeled the last star off the sheet.
If somebody once left something in your desk and never said a word about it, tell them you remember. They might still be around to hear it.
For more stories of people stepping up when a child needs help, read about the ten-year-old’s birdhouses and the little girl with her mama’s number in her lunchbox. And for another family secret finally coming to light, there’s the stepmother who swore she’d never met the bride’s mother.
