The good coffee at Dixie Highway’s Meijer sits on the lowest shelf, where nobody bends for it. I bend for it every Thursday, and my knees file a complaint every Thursday. That’s our routine, mine and Catalina’s, ever since her mother died in the spring of 2022. At six, I pick her up from the after-school program. We shop. She argues.
Last Thursday, around twenty to seven, she insisted that cheese crackers count as dairy. I told her nice try.
Then a boy rounded the corner of the snack aisle. Five, maybe. A thin T-shirt with dried stains down its front. No jacket. Bare feet on that tile, and it was thirty-four degrees in the parking lot. He clutched a package of dinner rolls just as Catalina once held her rabbit.
He stared at her pink light-up sneakers. She gave him her apple-sauce pouch, and he emptied it in about four seconds without breathing.
Catalina asked him why he didn’t have shoes.
He looked at me instead of her and said, “Daddy took my shoes ’cause I wet the bed again.”
I picked him up. His arms locked around my neck, and his feet were ice against my jeans.
We didn’t make it out of the aisle. His father came around the end-cap with a cart holding energy drinks and cigarettes and nothing to eat, and told me to get my hands off his kid, old man. He threatened charges. Kim, the manager, told me twice to hand the boy back. Shirley from the bakery came, and Marquis, the stocker who carries my water jugs, and another stocker, and five shoppers, two with phones up.
I told Kim to call the police. I said I’d stand right there with him till they came.
Kim reached for her phone. The boy put his mouth against my ear.
“My sister’s still in the truck.”
The red truck by the cart corral
I didn’t say anything for a second. I’d like to tell you I had a plan. I had a five-year-old on my hip and a seven-year-old on my belt loop and a grown man’s hand out flat a foot from my chest.
“What truck, bud?” I said.
He said it into my collar. “The red one. By the carts.”
“How old’s your sister?”
“She’s a baby.”
The father couldn’t hear him. He could see the boy’s mouth moving, though, and something in his face went loose for half a second. Then he put it back.
“Whatever he’s telling you, he lies,” he said. “He lies about everything. Ask anybody.”
Ask anybody. There were thirteen of us in that aisle mouth, counting the boy, and not one of us knew who he was.
I turned to Marquis. That kid has carried forty pounds of water jugs to my Buick every Thursday for a year and never once let me tip him.
“Marquis,” I said. “Red truck by the cart corral. There’s a baby in it.”
Marquis didn’t ask me a single question. He was gone. The other stocker went after him, and I heard their shoes slapping all the way to the front doors.
The father went after them too.
He got about three steps. Shirley, sixty-six years old, in a hairnet, with flour to the elbows, stepped into the middle of the aisle and didn’t move. She didn’t touch him. She just stood there the way she stands behind that bakery counter when somebody says the cake was supposed to say Happy Birthday Brenda and it says Brenda already.
“You stay right here, honey,” she said. “The police will want to talk to you.”
“Get out of my way.”
“No,” Shirley said.
He looked at her, and then at the two phones, which were still up and had gotten a lot more interested. He didn’t push her. A man who takes shoes off a five-year-old in November doesn’t shove a grandmother on camera. He knows exactly what he can do and where.
Kim had her phone at her ear by then. Her voice changed in the middle of a sentence. She’d started with “a disturbance in aisle seven” and ended with “there may be an infant in a vehicle, please hurry.”
Catalina pulled my belt loop. “Grandpa. Is there a baby in the cold?”
“Marquis is getting her,” I said.
I said it like I knew. I didn’t know anything. I knew it was thirty-four degrees and the boy’s feet were ice, and I was standing there counting backward how long that cart had been in the store. Energy drinks. Cigarettes. Long enough to walk around and get mad at somebody.
The father started talking to the phones again, only now it had a different tune. “She was sleeping. She was asleep, okay? I was in here five minutes. Five minutes. You people have never run into a store?”
Nobody answered him.
Four minutes later, by the clock over the pharmacy, the front doors hissed open, and Marquis came down the main aisle at a run with a bundle against his chest. The bundle was a baby wrapped in his own blue Meijer vest and the sweatshirt off his own back. He was in a T-shirt. His arms were all goosebumps.
He came right up to me, because I’m the one who sent him, and he said, “The truck wasn’t locked. Engine was off. Mr. Herman, she’s so cold.”
The baby wasn’t crying. That was the worst part. A baby in the cold who isn’t crying.
Shirley took her. Shirley took her the way you take a cake out of the oven when the timer’s already gone off, fast and sure, and put her straight inside her bakery smock against her own skin and wrapped both arms around.
“How long was she out there?” Kim said to the father.
He said, “Five minutes.”
The boy lifted his head off my shoulder for the first time since the apple sauce.
“We came before it was dark,” he said.
It had been dark since twenty past five.
Officer Juarez
Two officers got there at 6:58. I know because Catalina asked me what time it was about every forty seconds, and I kept looking.
The first one through the doors was a woman named Juarez, short, with her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt. The second one went straight to the front of the store, where an ambulance crew was coming in behind him.
The paramedics took the baby from Shirley. Shirley didn’t want to let go. She did anyway, and then she stood there with her arms still bent like they’d forgotten.
Officer Juarez looked at all of us, the cart, the man, me with the boy on my hip, and she said, “Okay. Who’s the father?”
“Me,” he said. “And that man grabbed my son. I want to press charges.”
I’ll give him this. He didn’t quit.
“Okay,” Juarez said. “We’ll get to it. Sir, what’s your name?”
“Damian.”
“Damian, where are your son’s shoes?”
He looked at her like she’d asked him a math problem. “In the truck.”
“Why are his shoes in the truck?”
“Because he pissed the bed. Again. He’s five. He knows better. He doesn’t get nice shoes if he can’t act like a big boy.”
He said it to the whole aisle. He said it like we’d all agree. He said it like he was being reasonable and the world was too soft.
Somebody behind me said, “Oh my God.” It was the woman who’d said I had to be seventy. Her phone had come down to her side.
“And the baby?” Juarez said.
“She was asleep. You don’t wake up a sleeping baby. Everybody knows that.”
“In thirty-four degrees.”
“She had a blanket.”
Marquis said, “There wasn’t no blanket.” He was shaking now too, in his T-shirt. “There was a car seat and a bunch of cans on the floor. That’s it.”
Damian turned on him. “Who the hell asked you?”
“You did,” Marquis said. “When you left her.”
Damian took a step at him, and Juarez put one hand on his arm, not hard, and he stopped. He looked at the hand like it belonged to somebody who’d lost their mind.
Then he looked at me.
“This is your fault,” he said. “You know that? Old man. You couldn’t mind your own business. If you’d given him back, I’d have been out of here. She’d be fine. She’d be home. This is on you.”
That’s the thing I keep turning over. He believed it. Right then, in front of all of us, with his little girl going out the doors on a stretcher, he believed the problem in that store was me.
Officer Juarez asked me to put the boy down so she could talk to him.
I tried. He wouldn’t let go. His arms locked tighter and he made a sound, not a word, the kind of sound Catalina used to make at three in the morning that first spring when she woke up and remembered.
“It’s all right,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here.”
I sat down on the floor. Right in the snack aisle, between the cheese crackers and the pretzels, sixty-four years old with a bad knee and my back against a shelf. Catalina sat down next to me without being told. She took one of her light-up sneakers off and put it on the boy’s foot.
It was way too big. It lit up pink when his heel bumped the floor.
He looked down at it. Then he looked up at Catalina.
“You can borrow it,” she said.
Juarez crouched down in front of us and talked to the boy right there, with him in my lap. She asked him his name. Ramiro. She asked how old. Five. She asked about his sister. Ayana. She’s a baby. She asked about the shoes.
He told her. Same flat little voice. Like the time. I won’t write all of it here, because it’s his and not mine, but I’ll tell you it was not the first time, and the shoes were not the worst thing.
When he was done, Juarez stood up and her knees cracked too, and she turned around.
“Damian,” she said. “Put your hands behind your back.”
His cart
He didn’t go easy.
I’d been waiting all night to see what his real face looked like, and I got it then. He shouted that Juarez couldn’t do this, that he had rights, that he’d been in there five minutes. He shouted at Kim that her store was going to get sued. He shouted at the woman with the phone to keep filming because this was police brutality, and she did keep filming, but not the way he wanted.
Then he looked down at me on the floor with his boy in my lap, and he tried something else.
“Ramiro,” he said. “Buddy. Come here. Tell them you made it up. Tell them, and we’ll go home and get McDonald’s.”
Ramiro put his face back in my neck.
“Ramiro. I’m talking to you.”
The boy didn’t move.
That’s when Damian broke. I don’t mean he cried. I mean his voice went up high like a kid’s and he said, “Everybody leaves me alone with them. Everybody. Their mother left, her mother won’t pick up, I work all day, I do everything, and nobody, nobody…”
Juarez said, “Sir, the baby’s temperature was ninety-four.”
He stopped.
“Ninety-four,” she said again.
And I watched it get into him. He looked toward the front doors where the ambulance had been. He looked at his cart. A case of energy drinks and a carton of cigarettes, sitting there in the aisle where he’d left it, under the fluorescent lights, in front of thirteen people. Not a jar of baby food in it. Not a diaper.
He looked at it the way you’d look at your own handwriting on a confession.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t think.”
“No,” Shirley said.
That was the only thing anybody said back to him. Shirley. No.
The second officer came and they walked him out between the registers, cuffed, past the Redbox and the gumball machines and the bulletin board with the lost cat posters. People in the checkout lines turned around. He kept his head down.
His cart stayed in the snack aisle. Kim looked at it a long time. Then she pushed it to the end-cap herself and left it there, and I heard her tell Marquis to put every bit of it back on the shelves.
Officer Juarez came back and crouched down to us again.
“Mr. Herman,” she said. “About him pressing charges.”
“I figured,” I said.
“There’s no report. There isn’t going to be one. You held a barefoot child in a public store till we came. That’s what we’d ask you to do.” She looked at Ramiro. “Does he have anybody? Other than the father?”
Ramiro said, into my collar, “Grandma Noreen.”
Grandma Noreen
Noreen got there at 8:30. She’d driven forty minutes from Fairfield in house slippers with her coat on over a nightgown. The kids’ mother was her daughter. She’d been trying to get those kids for a year, and Damian hadn’t let her past the front door since summer.
I was still on the floor of the snack aisle. Kim had brought me a folding chair. I didn’t use it. Ramiro had fallen asleep in my lap with one pink light-up sneaker on, and I wasn’t about to move.
Noreen came down that aisle and saw him and put both hands over her mouth. She knelt right down on that tile next to me in her nightgown. She didn’t take him from me. She put her hand on his foot, the bare one, and held it.
“He’s cold,” she said.
“He was colder,” I said.
She looked at me a long time. “You’re the man.”
“I’m a man.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then she couldn’t say anything else, and we sat on the floor of the Meijer and two old people cried while Catalina explained to Noreen that cheese crackers are basically dairy.
Ayana kept her fingers and her toes. Ninety-four came back up to normal by morning. Noreen called me at ten Friday to say so. Damian was charged with two counts of child endangerment. Family court gave Noreen the kids on an emergency order that same afternoon.
My son Elliott called Friday night. He’d been calling since Thursday at nine to tell me I was a fool who was going to get himself sued or knifed.
He’d seen the video. Everybody in Hamilton County had seen the video by then.
“Dad,” he said.
“Yep.”
“There was a baby in the truck.”
“Yep.”
He was quiet. Then he said, “I’d have handed him back.”
“I know you would.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Come get groceries with us Thursday,” I said. “Bring your back. My knees are shot.”
The men at church shook my hand Sunday like they’d been with me all along. I let them. You get to my age, you find out a handshake is cheaper than being right.
Thursday
This Thursday I got Catalina from her program at six, same as always. Elliott met us in the lot. He carried the basket and complained the whole time about where we keep the coffee.
At twenty to seven, in the snack aisle, Catalina stopped dead.
Noreen was coming down the other end with a cart. Ayana was in the seat in a pink snowsuit, gnawing a teething ring. And walking beside the cart, holding the side of it with one hand, was Ramiro.
In shoes.
Brand-new sneakers, white with blue lights in the heels. Every step, they lit up.
He saw Catalina, and he let go of the cart and ran. He stopped a foot short of her and stomped, once, hard, so the lights went off, and looked at her to make sure she saw.
“Those are good,” Catalina said. “Mine are pink.”
“I know,” he said.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an apple-sauce pouch and held it out to her with both hands.
“You can have mine,” he said.
Catalina took it. She didn’t eat it. She put it in our cart like it was a dozen eggs.
Then Ramiro looked up at me.
He didn’t say anything. He just put his arms up.
I bent down. My knees complained. I picked him up anyway, and he weighed more than he did last week, and his feet were warm.
If this one got to you, send it to the person in your life who would have sat down on that floor too.
Stories of vulnerable kids and families facing cruelty continue in Four Boys Kicked My Sister’s Wheelchair on Her Fifteenth Birthday and My Son’s Teacher Kept His Fifteen Dollars in a Sealed Envelope. For another tense family moment, read My Girlfriend’s Uncle Laughed While I Knelt Beside The Sheet Cake.
