A developer’s wife raked fourteen bottles of children’s fever medicine into her cart while an old man asked her for one, and when he held out eight dollars she told him, “Maybe a man who can’t spare eight dollars shouldn’t be raising anybody.” Ninety seconds later the speakers in the ceiling said her name.
I was only in there for cough drops.
There’d been a shortage on the kids’ stuff since Christmas. Every pharmacy in Dubuque had bare hooks where it should’ve been.
That Tuesday a truck had finally come.
A stock clerk was still slicing open the carton, a pencil behind each ear for no reason I ever figured out, when she rolled up beside him.
Camel boots. A quilted coat that cost more than my car payment. Sunglasses pushed up into her hair in the middle of February.
She didn’t take two.
She took the shelf.
Grape, cherry, the dye-free kind, $6.49 a bottle, one forearm sweeping them in like crumbs off a table.
Behind her stood an old man in a canvas work jacket with the cuffs gone soft.
His basket had a loaf of bread in it and nothing else.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Could I get just the one?”
She kept sweeping.
“My granddaughter’s home with the lady next door. She was at a hundred and three at supper.”
“Put her in a cool bath,” the woman said. “That’s what we did.”
“I did. Twice.”
He reached toward the back of the shelf, where one bottle had slid behind the price strip.
Her hand got there first. Red nails, a ring like an ice cube.
“You’ve got thirteen,” he said. “She’s six.”
“I’ve got three grandkids coming to the lake this weekend and I am NOT driving back into town for this.”
That’s when my mouth opened on its own.
“Fourteen? You honestly need fourteen?”
She turned and looked at me the way you’d look at a cart somebody left in the fire lane.
“I don’t remember inviting you into this.”
The old man was digging in his jacket.
He came out with a five and three ones, folded down small, the way my dad used to keep church money.
“I’ll pay you for it,” he said. “Cash. You can keep the change off whatever’s left.”
She laughed.
A real laugh, head back.
“Maybe a man who can’t spare eight dollars shouldn’t be raising anybody.”
The clerk’s box cutter stopped.
Nobody in that aisle moved.
The old man put the bills back in his pocket very slowly, like they might tear.
“Her name’s Riya,” he said. “She hasn’t kept anything down since Sunday.”
“Then she won’t miss the grape.”
She shoved off. One front wheel squealed the whole way up the aisle.
At the end cap she looked over her shoulder at the three of us.
“And before anybody here decides to be a hero, my husband’s company built every subdivision north of the highway. Think real hard about who you’ll be calling when your furnace goes.”
Then she kept going.
The cart was so heavy on one side it kept wandering into the cereal.
She made it maybe twenty feet.
The ceiling clicked.
That little pop the speakers make before somebody reads off the deli specials.
Nothing for a second.
Then a woman’s voice. Older. Flat as a ruler.
“Heather Vogler.”
The cart stopped so hard it clipped a pyramid of oatmeal canisters, and two of them rolled out into the main aisle.
Every head at the registers turned.
“You just told aisle nine to think real hard about who they’d be calling.”
Heather’s hands came up off the handle and went back down on it.
“Who is this?” she said, to the ceiling.
A long pause. I could hear the freezer cases humming two aisles over.
“I’d like everybody in this store to do EXACTLY what she said.”
The old man beside me went very still.
Heather’s face went the color of the floor tile.
People were leaning out of the checkout lanes now, a cashier with a bag of onions in her hand.
The voice came back once more.
“Stay where you are, Heather. DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT CART AGAIN.”
“WHY?” Heather said, way too loud. “Why should I?”
“Because I have waited eleven years for you to walk into my building.”
Heather turned toward the glass office up over the customer service desk.
Somebody up there was standing at the window.
The old man said something under his breath I didn’t catch.
And Heather Vogler took both hands off the cart.
The stairs behind the service desk
The office door opened and Mrs. Reed came down the metal stairs.
I knew her before she hit the bottom step. Everybody who grew up on the north end knows Yvonne Reed. Her name has been on the sign out front since before I was born, red letters, REED’S MARKET, with the apostrophe that lights up a half second after the rest.
She was small. Store fleece with the logo on it, reading glasses hanging on a beaded chain, a piece of paper folded in thirds in one hand.
She didn’t hurry. She came past lane one and lane two and the cashier with the onions, and she stepped over a rolling oatmeal canister without looking down at it.
She put the folded paper in her fleece pocket.
Then she reached into Heather Vogler’s cart and took out one bottle of grape.
“That’s mine,” Heather said. “That is in my cart.”
“You haven’t paid for one thing in my store,” Mrs. Reed said.
She walked back up the aisle to us and held the bottle out to the old man.
He didn’t take it. He kept both hands in his jacket pockets, where the eight dollars was.
He looked at her for a long time.
“Hello, Vonnie,” he said.
Kestrel Court
Here’s what you need to know about me, and it’s not much.
I was thirty-one that winter. I rented half of a duplex at 4417 Kestrel Court, in Wolfe Ridge, which is the first subdivision north of the highway. Vinyl siding, a two-car garage I used for one car, a mailbox cluster at the corner that froze shut every January.
My keys had an orange plastic tag on them that said VOGLER PROPERTY MANAGEMENT and my unit number in marker. They give everybody one.
The furnace lived in a closet off the kitchen. It had been clicking since Thanksgiving, three clicks and then a whump, and I had called the Vogler property office three times about it. They said a tech would be out. Nobody came.
Every time I opened that closet to put the vacuum away, I looked at the same sticker on the side of the furnace. Yellow, curling at one corner.
TALBOT HEATING & COOLING. A phone number with a 563 in front. Under that, in ballpoint, Bert, 11/14.
I’d thought about calling that number about forty times. I figured it was disconnected. Who still answers a number off a sticker from 2014?
So I knew the Vogler name the way you know the name on your lease.
Everybody else in town knew it from the outfield fence at the Little League park, VOGLER HOMES in green, and from the picture in the Telegraph Herald every Thanksgiving, Heather in a quilted coat handing a big cardboard check to the food pantry. There was a donation bin by the front doors of Reed’s with the pantry’s logo on it, and a strip along the bottom that said Bin sponsored by Vogler Homes.
I’d dropped soup cans in it.
And I knew Reed’s because my mom shopped there for twenty years. I remember the spring I was twenty, a sign in the front window, hand-lettered, REED’S IS NOT CLOSING. My mom read it out loud in the car and said, “Yvonne signed for somebody. That’s what I heard.” Then she turned up the radio and we never talked about it again.
That was what I had, standing in aisle nine with a box of cough drops.
The old man in the canvas jacket still hadn’t taken the bottle. Up close the jacket had a patch of darker canvas over the left pocket, a rectangle with a row of tiny holes around it where something had been sewn on and picked off.
Heather had come back down the aisle. She had her sunglasses in her hand now.
“I know exactly who you are, Yvonne,” she said. “Ring me up. All of it.”
Lane four
Mrs. Reed didn’t answer her.
She turned to the clerk with the pencils. “Where’s the sign, hon?”
He had it under his arm the whole time. A sheet of printer paper in a plastic sleeve, LIMIT 2 PER FAMILY, in big black letters. He’d been about to tape it up when Heather rolled in. The tape was still on his wrist like a bracelet.
“Put it up,” Mrs. Reed said.
“It wasn’t up when I took them,” Heather said. “You can’t make a rule after.”
“I can make a rule whenever I want. It’s on the shelf, it’s mine.”
Heather wheeled the cart around, oatmeal dust on the front wheel, and pushed it straight to lane four. The cashier with the onions set them down on the belt like she’d forgotten whose they were. Her name tag said TRACY.
“Scan them,” Heather said.
Tracy looked at Mrs. Reed.
A man came out of the back from the direction of the dairy cooler, maybe forty, tie under a store fleece, name tag that said JOSH and under it STORE MANAGER. He took Mrs. Reed by the elbow, very gentle, and said something low.
I was close enough to hear it.
“Mrs. Reed. Vogler’s people are doing our parking lot in April. We signed in December. Let’s just get her out of here.”
“Then let her go,” Mrs. Reed said. “The medicine stays.”
That’s when I tried to fix it, and I am telling you this part because it’s the part I’m least proud of.
I walked over to the old man, and I said, “Let me get it. Please. I’ll put it on my card, it’s nothing, you don’t even have to pay me back.”
I meant it nicely. I could see right away that it didn’t land nicely.
He looked at me the way my dad used to look at anybody who tried to tip him.
“I’ve got eight dollars,” he said.
“I know you do, I just…”
“I’ve got eight dollars, miss.”
I’d taken my keys out of my coat pocket without thinking, the way you do when you’re about to pay. I was holding them in front of me with the cough drops. The orange tag was hanging right off the ring.
Heather Vogler was ten feet away at lane four.
She looked at the tag. She read it. Her lips moved on the number.
“Forty-four seventeen Kestrel,” she said. “That’s one of ours.”
Bert, 11/14
Nobody said anything for a second. Tracy had one hand on the scanner. Josh had both hands in his fleece pockets.
Heather smiled at me. A small one.
“When’s your lease up, sweetheart?”
I didn’t answer her. My face was hot all the way up to my hair.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll look.”
Mrs. Reed was still holding the grape bottle out. Her arm had to be getting tired. She was seventy-something and she held it there like a crossing guard holding a sign.
“Bert,” she said. “Riya’s at a hundred and three. Take it.”
He didn’t move.
“Then pay me for it,” she said. “Eight dollars. Six forty-nine and tax. I’ll give you change.”
He took the five and the three ones out of his jacket. He unfolded them on his palm and smoothed them flat with his thumb, one bill at a time, and handed them to her. She put them in her fleece pocket with the folded paper. She didn’t give him change. He didn’t ask for it.
She put the bottle in his basket, next to the bread.
“How’d you get here?” she said.
“Walked.”
“From Rhomberg? In this?”
“Truck’s been gone since ’15, Vonnie. You know that.”
There was snow still melting on the shoulders of his jacket, two dark spots. I hadn’t even seen them before.
Mrs. Reed turned and pointed at the bench by the pharmacy counter, the one where people wait for prescriptions.
“Mr. Talbot,” she said. “Sit down before you fall down.”
He went and sat.
And I stood there in the middle of aisle nine and heard her say it again in my head. Mr. Talbot.
I thought about my furnace closet. The vacuum. The yellow sticker with the curling corner. Three clicks and a whump.
TALBOT HEATING & COOLING. Bert, 11/14.
The man on the bench had been in my kitchen before I ever lived there.
The paper in her fleece pocket
Mrs. Reed went back up the metal stairs.
Heather laughed at that, a short one. “Is she leaving? Is that it?”
The ceiling clicked again.
“This is Yvonne Reed. I own this store and this building. Mrs. Vogler asked everybody in aisle nine to think real hard about who they’d be calling when their furnace goes. So let’s do it. If you’ve got a furnace in your house with a Talbot Heating sticker on it, I’d like you to put your hand up.”
Nobody did.
I knew why. Half that store lived north of the highway. Half that store had an orange tag on their keys.
Tracy looked down at her scanner. Josh looked at the floor.
I put my hand up. I still had the keys in it, so the orange tag swung back and forth over my head like a little flag.
Heather looked right at it.
Then Tracy put her hand up. She didn’t look at anybody. She just put it up, holding a bag of onions in the other one.
Then a man in coveralls in lane two. Then a woman with a toddler on her hip in the bread aisle. Then a kid in a Loras sweatshirt who couldn’t have been old enough to own a furnace and probably meant his mom’s.
I stopped counting at eleven.
The office door opened again and Mrs. Reed came back down. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She took the folded paper out of her fleece pocket, the one she’d brought down the first time, and she unfolded it.
It had gone soft at the creases like an old map. The letterhead was green. VOGLER HOMES.
She read it out loud, standing right there by the service desk, with her reading glasses on now.
“‘Vogler Homes disputes the invoices submitted by Talbot Heating and Cooling for units twelve through thirty-nine at Wolfe Ridge, in the amount of eighty-six thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. Any further correspondence should be directed to our attorneys.'” She turned the page toward lane four. “Signed Heather Vogler, Comptroller. March of 2015.”
Twenty-eight houses. Mine was one of them.
From the bench Bert Talbot said, “Vonnie. Don’t.”
“I co-signed for those furnaces, Bert,” Mrs. Reed said. “I put this building up. I get to read my own mail.”
Lane four, again
Heather didn’t go quiet. I want to be clear about that, because people who hear this story always want her to go quiet.
She came around the end of lane four with her sunglasses still in her hand, pointing with them.
“You want to do this in front of the whole store, Yvonne? Fine. Fine. Let’s do it. Your brother put in builder-grade units two months late on a forty-house job. He couldn’t read a contract. He couldn’t read a calendar. We had closings stacked up through Christmas and people moving into houses with space heaters, and I’m supposed to cut a check to a one-truck outfit because he’s somebody’s brother? That’s not how business works. That’s how charity works. I give to charity. Ask anybody. Ask the pantry. That’s my name on that bin.”
She pointed at the donation bin by the doors.
“And you,” she said to me. “You’ve got a lot of opinions for somebody with a lease. You’re on a twelve-month. They all are. May thirty-first. You can put your hand up all you want on June first, on somebody else’s property.”
I put my hand down. That’s the truth. I didn’t have anything to say back to that, so I didn’t say anything.
“And Josh,” she said. “Josh, honey. You’ve got a parking lot coming in April. You might want to go find out if you still do.”
Josh took his hands out of his pockets.
He walked to the shelf in aisle nine, took the roll of tape off the clerk’s wrist, and taped the LIMIT 2 PER FAMILY sign to the edge of the shelf, right over the price strip. He pressed the corners down. Then he walked to lane four and started taking bottles out of Heather’s cart and lining them up on the belt where she could see them, grape, cherry, dye-free, one at a time.
“Two,” he said. “Mrs. Vogler, you can buy two. The rest go back.”
Heather looked at the belt. She looked at Bert on the bench with his loaf of bread. She looked up at the glass office, which was empty now, because Mrs. Reed was standing ten feet away.
“Fine,” she said. “Two.”
She paid with a hundred. Tracy counted out the change into her hand very slowly, bill by bill. Heather didn’t put the change away. She took the two bottles off the belt, cherry and dye-free, didn’t bag them, and walked toward the front doors with her heels clicking.
At the donation bin she stopped.
She dropped both bottles into it. They hit the bottom with two hollow knocks.
“For the needy,” Heather Vogler said, loud enough for every lane.
And she went out through the automatic doors into the parking lot, and they slid shut behind her.
Mrs. Reed walked over to the bin, reached in up to her shoulder, and fished out both bottles. She handed them to the clerk.
“Back on the shelf,” she said.
I went to the bench. Bert was sitting with the basket on his knees, the bread and the grape and his hands folded over both.
“I’ve got my car out front,” I said. “I’m going your way.”
“You don’t know my way.”
“Rhomberg,” I said. “She said it twice.”
He looked at me for a while. Then he stood up.
Three clicks and a whump
My lease wasn’t renewed. The letter came in April on the green letterhead, which I guess they still use, and it didn’t give a reason, which I guess they don’t have to.
I moved out on May thirty-first. The new place is a one-bedroom over a laundromat on Central, a hundred and forty dollars more a month and no garage, and the car sits out on the street all winter now. I don’t love it.
In October I went into Reed’s for cough drops.
The fever medicine was on the shelf in aisle nine. A full row. The LIMIT 2 PER FAMILY sign was still taped over the price strip, gone a little yellow, the tape lifting at one corner.
When I got home the furnace in my new closet made a noise like a coffee can full of bolts.
I didn’t call the landlord. I got out the old number. I’d written it on the back of a receipt the night I moved, off the sticker in the Kestrel Court closet, the last thing I did there before I left the keys on the counter with the orange tag.
He answered on the second ring.
He came on a Saturday with a canvas bag of tools, and Riya came with him because the lady next door was at a wedding. She sat on an upside-down bucket in my kitchen and handed him screws one at a time out of a sandwich bag, and told me twice that she was seven now.
It took him an hour and ten minutes. He wouldn’t let me pay for the part.
When he was done he took a sticker off a roll in his bag, yellow, peeled the back off, and wrote on it in ballpoint, the date and his name.
He pressed it flat on the side of my furnace with his thumb.
“Now you know who to call,” Bert said.
If you’ve got a sticker like that on your furnace with a name in ballpoint, call the number before the cold comes and see who picks up.
Stories of cruelty, courage, and the moment someone finally steps in run through a family secret exposed at an engagement party, a daughter’s numbered notes to her father, and the stranger who stood up for a boy at the pool.
