A man half my age knocked me flat in a grocery lot because I stood too long looking at the two handicap spaces his Yukon was straddling, the ones my wife can’t do without. Then he stood over me and said, “I already called the cops on you, old man.” He had no idea who was driving the car that answered.
Rosemary and I have done the Food Fair in Cullman every Monday at ten for nineteen years.
She can’t walk the lot anymore.
Not since the hip.
Those two blue spaces by the door are the only reason she still gets to pick out her own tomatoes.
That Monday a white Yukon had both of them, parked crooked across the pair like somebody dropped it from a crane. Paper dealer plates. No placard anywhere.
So I parked down by the cart corral, about as far from the doors as you can get, and told her I’d be quick.
“Get the good bologna,” she said. “Not the kind in the tube.”
I’m eighty-one. My canvas work coat is older than that building, and I iron my shirts on Sunday nights so the crease lasts the week.
I bought what we always buy.
A carton of buttermilk, a box of grits, two cans of pears, a pound of bologna sliced at the counter, and a bag of the butterscotch candies Rosemary swears she never eats and then eats.
I paid cash and counted it twice. Two paper sacks, one for each hand. The young lady at register three offered to carry them out and I shook my head at her like I do every week.
None of them in there know I once drove three hundred and sixty miles overnight to a funeral for a man I’d met twice, because I’d told him I would come.
The sky was low and gray. A woman two rows over was eating fried chicken out of a box on the hood of her car.
I was halfway back to the truck when I stopped at the Yukon.
I didn’t touch it.
I looked at the blue wheelchair painted under its front tire. Then at the dash, which had a phone mount and a little spiral notepad and no placard.
Then at Rosemary’s face behind our windshield, three rows back.
The driver came out of the store with a phone on his ear. Big, red in the face, a golf shirt, sunglasses pushed up into hair that was giving up. He was telling somebody the numbers were the numbers.
He hung up and found me standing at his bumper.
“Can I help you?” he said.
He didn’t mean it.
I didn’t answer him. I’ve had eighty-one years of watching men decide what kind of men they’re going to be, and I wanted to see which one he’d pick.
His keys came up in his fist.
“BACK OFF the vehicle, pal. That’s an eighty-four-thousand-dollar car.”
I stayed where I was.
“I SAID back off.”
Then both his hands hit me in the chest.
My heels came up off the ground.
Both sacks split at once. The buttermilk burst on the asphalt and the grits went out in a pale fan across the paint. Pears rolled off under tires and bumped against the corral, and the bologna in its white paper slid to a stop beside his back wheel.
I landed on my hip and stayed there with one hand flat on the ground.
Across the lot, our horn went once. Long.
“I already called the cops on you, old man.”
His arm shot out over my head toward the road, and he got loud enough for the doors to hear him.
“You hear me? I CALLED THEM. Harassing people in a parking lot. Let’s see how tough you are with a badge in your face.”
A county cruiser turned in off the highway and came down the row slow, no lights, gravel popping under the tires at the edge of the lot.
It stopped behind the Yukon and sat there idling.
Then the door opened.
The deputy who got out was twenty-six and wide through the shoulders, tan uniform, hat pulled low against the gray. He moved like a man still getting used to the weight on his belt.
He looked at the Yukon. At the man pointing. At the cans.
Then down at me.
He quit walking.
His hand had been drifting toward his belt and it stopped halfway there. The color left his face and came back wrong.
“Officer, thank God,” the man said. “This guy was all over my vehicle, he got aggressive, he wouldn’t move—”
The deputy wasn’t listening.
He crossed to me in three steps, went down on one knee in my grits, and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Granddad?”
It cracked a little in the middle.
Evan. Laurie’s oldest. Six months on the county.
I looked up at him and didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.
“WHO PUT YOU ON THE GROUND?” he said.
He got an arm under my elbow and stood me up like I weighed nothing. He brushed the grits off my coat. Then he held me by both arms and looked at my face a long time.
The man’s arm was still pointing. It came down slow, like the arm had figured something out before the rest of him. His mouth opened. His sunglasses slid off the top of his head into his hair.
Over in the corral the carts knocked together in the wind.
Evan turned his head and looked at him for the first time.
There was no anger in it at all, and that scared me more than if there had been.
“Sir,” he said. “You’re going to tell me EXACTLY what happened here. Then you’re going to move this vehicle.”
He bent and picked one butterscotch out of the split sack and dropped it in my coat pocket. He’s been doing that since he was four, and every person watching could tell.
“And after that,” Evan said, “you’re going to explain why my grandfather’s license plate is written on that notepad on your dash.”
The man went white.
“What notepad?” he said. “I never—”
I spoke for the first time.
“He’s been sitting out here since Friday, Evan,” I said. “Asking the bag boys about my truck.”
The passenger door
“I wanted to buy a truck,” the man said.
He said it fast, to Evan and not to me. His hand went to his sunglasses and found them in his hair.
“That’s all. I sell cars. I saw a ’71 Ford with the original paint and I wanted to make an offer. Is that a crime?”
“Open the door,” Evan said.
“You can’t just—”
“It’s open. Your window’s down. I’m asking you to open it so I don’t reach in.”
The man opened it. Evan took the notepad off the dash and held it where I could see.
It was a cheap one, the kind with the wire across the top. Six lines, six plates, in a hand that leaned hard to the right.
Mine was the fifth. I know my own tag.
Next to it he’d written a Monday and a time. 10:00. Three more Mondays above that one, all the same time, with a check by each.
Nobody had to tell me what the checks were for. They were for the mornings I’d walked in the doors and he’d been watching me do it.
“Granddad,” Evan said, and he said it quiet. “Do you know any of the other five?”
I took the pad from him. My hand wasn’t doing what I told it. The fourth line down had a name beside the plate and the name had been crossed out with one hard stroke.
Gaither.
Three notes
I should say about the notes.
The first one was under my wiper the second Monday in August, folded in four, on the back of a business card. It said he’d pay cash for the Ford. A phone number, a first name.
I put it in my pocket and threw it in the trash can by the corral.
The second came two weeks later, thicker money, same number. I read the whole thing at the cart return and dropped it in the same can. Rosemary asked from the window what it was and I said an ad.
The third one said, Last chance, sir. I don’t make this offer to everybody.
That one I stood and looked at for a while.
The truck’s not worth what he wrote down. It’s a green Ford with a bench seat and a gearshift I’ve replaced twice. I bought it in 1971 off a man in Hanceville for eleven hundred dollars, and I’ve put three kids in the cab of it, and one of them was Laurie, and Laurie put Evan there.
And Rosemary rides in it on Mondays. That’s the part you can’t put a number on.
So I threw out the third note too.
What I hadn’t told anybody, not even her, was that Stan Gaither said something to me at the deli counter two weeks before that. He’s seventy-eight and I’ve known him since we both had hair. He’d had a Ranger he kept clean as a church. He said he’d sold it.
“Fella in the lot,” Stan said. “Real polite. Eighteen hundred, cash.”
“That truck’s worth six.”
“I know what it’s worth, Walter.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it. He looked at the slicer.
I let it go. You let a lot go at our age, and a man’s business is his own. I paid for my bologna and went out to the truck and the third note was waiting.
I think about that now.
Evan was still holding the notepad when Rosemary’s walker came across the lot.
Rosemary’s phone
She’d got out of the truck.
I didn’t see her do it. Nobody did. She had that walker with the tennis balls on the feet and she was coming up the row at about the pace of a funeral, one hand on the grip and the other holding her phone out in front of her like a lantern.
“Rosemary,” I said. “Sit down.”
“I will not.”
It took her six minutes. I counted, because I was standing there with my hip going and there wasn’t anything else to do.
The man tried to use them. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry about all this, your husband got confused—”
She didn’t look at him.
“Evan,” she said. “Come here, baby.”
He went. She put the phone in his hand and said one thing about it and didn’t say another.
“I film everything,” Rosemary said. “Theresa wants to see the tomatoes.”
That’s her sister, in Mobile. Every Monday for nineteen years my wife has propped her phone on the dash and filmed the lot for Theresa, the weather and the cart corral and whatever Rosemary is looking at that week. She says it keeps her sister from feeling left out. I’ve never watched one.
Evan held the phone flat in both hands. We could all hear it. Wind, a cart rattling, Rosemary’s own voice saying Look at that fool in the blue spaces. And then the man himself, on the screen, coming out the doors with the phone at his ear.
The clock in the corner said 10:21.
He stopped at his own back bumper. He lowered the phone from his face and looked at me, standing there, for about as long as it takes to read a sign. Then he put the phone back up and said something with his hand pointing at me.
He hadn’t hung up on anyone. He’d called it in before he ever touched me.
“Dispatch sent me at 10:22,” Evan said, to nobody. “A man harassing customers by the front doors.”
The Yukon man laughed a little. It wasn’t a good one.
“I was about to be harassed. You can see how he was standing.”
Evan looked at the phone. Then at the man. Then he said something into the radio on his shoulder that I didn’t catch, and a voice came back, flat and slow, with a name on it.
Sergeant Rutledge.
“Evan,” the voice said. “You stay right where you are and you don’t touch him. That’s your people on the ground. You’re a witness, son.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m twelve minutes out.”
Twelve minutes
I could have gone home.
I thought about it, standing there. I thought about the milk in the asphalt and the grits on his paint and my wife’s weight on that walker and my grandson’s face. Nobody was bleeding. I could take Rosemary’s arm and say forget it, Evan, it’s only groceries, and we could drive home with nothing in the sacks.
I said so.
“Evan,” I said. “Let him go. I’ll get my wife home.”
“Granddad, I can’t.”
“It’s only a shove.”
“It’s a call,” he said. “It’s in the log. I’m on it with my name.”
And then the man did what I’d wanted him to do from the start, which was show me which one he was.
He smiled.
It wasn’t big. He pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes and he took a step toward his open door, and he said to my grandson, very pleasant, “Deputy, I’m going to go ahead and leave. If you want to find me, you know where I work.”
That’s when I walked back around to his bumper.
I did it slow, on the hip, and I stood in the same spot I’d been standing when he hit me. The pears had gone around me. A can had stopped against my shoe.
Behind it the Yukon had two blue spaces and three feet of paint and no room to back out, because I was in it.
He looked at me.
“Move, old man.”
I didn’t say anything.
I looked at the boy by the corral instead. Darius. Eighteen, thin, an apron and a name tag, who’s brought in the carts every Monday since the spring and calls me Mr. Walter. He’d been standing there the whole time with six carts in front of him, looking at his shoes.
He looked up.
What Darius had on his phone
“I didn’t want to say,” Darius said.
His voice was going up and down. Nobody was making him do it.
“He gave me forty dollars. Friday. He said he was a friend of yours and he wanted to surprise you about the truck.” He swallowed. “He said text him when you came in Monday. Which spot you took. I never did, Mr. Walter. I swear it. I took the money and I didn’t text him.”
“Forty dollars,” Evan said.
“It’s in my locker. I never spent it.”
The man in the golf shirt turned his head and it was a different face. The red had gone out of it and what was under it was flat, and he said it very quietly.
“You little shit.”
Nobody in that lot moved.
Evan said it for him. “Say that again.”
“I’m done talking.”
“No, sir. You’re not.”
And then the man did what he’d been doing the whole time, only louder. He said he’d done nothing wrong. He said I’d stood in front of his car for ten minutes with my hands in my pockets. He said everybody in the lot had seen it, and he waved his hand at the woman with the fried chicken, and she put the lid down on the box. He said his cousin was an attorney in Birmingham. He said he’d sue the county, the store, the deputy, the boy. He said Stan Gaither had come to him, he hadn’t gone to Stan.
That’s when I knew he’d said the name out loud.
“Nobody said Stan,” I told him.
He quit.
I turned the notepad over. On the back, in the same slanted hand, was a column. Four names. Next to each, a letter and a number. C and S and 1800. C and S and 2200. C and S and 900.
By mine there was only a C, and a question mark.
“What’s the C stand for?” Evan said.
The man didn’t answer him.
Darius did. “Complaint,” he said. “He told me. When I took the forty. He said some people take a little help getting to yes.”
The passenger side
It came out of the man in pieces, the way the grits had come out of the sack.
Evan did most of it with his voice and a notebook, and Rutledge came in the middle of it, and by then the man had given up on being polite and was giving up on being quiet. He didn’t confess to anything. He talked. A man like that talks until the talking is the confession.
He said he’d never hurt anybody. He said he’d called in a concern. A man standing too long by a vehicle was a concern, and a concern got a deputy, and a deputy got a report, and a report with an old man’s name on it got people talking, and he could make it go away. That was a service. He’d explained it very kindly to Stan Gaither, he said, over the phone, and Stan had understood.
“Eighteen hundred,” Evan said.
“For a truck he didn’t drive.”
“Because he was scared.”
“Because he was smart.”
Rutledge looked at me while the man said it. He’s a heavy man with a gray mustache and he took his hat off, which I hadn’t seen a county sergeant do in a grocery lot.
“Mr. Upchurch,” he said. “You parked down by the corral on purpose?”
“My wife needs the blue spaces, sir.”
“I know what your wife needs.”
He looked at the Yukon. At the two spaces, the paper plates, the wheelchair under the tire. At the man.
“He parked there,” I said. “I don’t think he parked there by accident. I stop at any car in those spaces. Every Monday, nineteen years, you can ask Monique at register three. I stand there until they come out and I look at them. He knew that. He parked there so I’d stand there.”
“And then you did.”
“And then I did.”
Nobody said what that cost. It would have taken too long.
Evan didn’t write it down. He just looked at me with that face he had when he was seven and I’d told him the dog was gone.
The man tried one more time. He said he’d leave, and Rutledge said no, he wouldn’t. He said he wanted a lawyer. Rutledge said that was fair, and took the keys out of his hand like you take a toy from a child.
He sat down on the curb by the cart corral with his sunglasses in his lap.
The woman with the fried chicken had gone to her car.
Friday
Evan took a week of desk work. That was the price, for him, for kneeling in my grits before the sergeant had said he could.
He told me so on the porch Sunday and he didn’t want me to feel bad about it. I didn’t say anything.
Stan Gaither came by on Wednesday with his hat in his hand. He didn’t want to talk about it and neither did I. He sat on the step and we watched the road, and after a while he said the man had come to him at the lot, too, and he’d been too ashamed to tell anyone.
“I know,” I said.
“How much for your truck, Walter?”
“It’s not for sale.”
“No,” Stan said. “I guess it never was.”
Rosemary’s hip took the rest of the week to forgive the walk. She sat in the chair with the heating pad and she didn’t complain, and when I came in to ask she said she’d do it again, and told me to stop asking.
The Yukon was gone from the lot by the next Monday. It was a lot, that was all.
I pulled the truck into the first blue space by the door. I came around and opened her side, and she took my arm and the walker both, and we went through the doors at ten like we had for nineteen years.
Darius was at the carts. He gave me one with a good wheel.
At the tomatoes Rosemary picked up three and put two back. She propped the phone on the shelf against a box of crackers and held up the third to the lens for Theresa.
“Get the good bologna,” she said. “Not the kind in the tube.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still stands up in a parking lot for a stranger’s parking space.
The notes you throw away can become the questions you wish you’d asked – about a ramp no one wanted to discuss, a bike left with a flat tire, or a neighbor who never used his driveway.
