Short Story

There was an overweight, frumpy lady who used to come into the grocery store on Thursday evenings. I don’t think it was every week. Usually more like twice a month. Super Valu was a small operation: one manager, one checkout girl (yes, they were all girls), and one bagger. I did a hell of a lot more in that place than just bag groceries, but that was the easiest thing to call me. The Thursday evening shift was 3-10pm. The store closed at 10 and that’s exactly when I liked to be walking out the door to head to my truck.

But it never worked out that way with this lady. Maybe she liked the solitude. Maybe she had some mental issues. I don’t know. But she never showed up a minute earlier than 9:50pm. She waddled in with her oversized handbag and a fistful of coupons, paused at the carts, and took a look around with her mouth half open as if she needed to familiarize herself with the surroundings, like she had never been there before. Were the greeting cards there two weeks ago? Are those the vegetables? Seems like the bakery was over here last week? I was irritated at the sight of her. Get on with it lady.

I wish I could say that she managed to do her shopping in the remaining 10 minutes, but she didn’t. It was bad enough that she was messing up my freshly mopped aisles, the ones that were not quite dry yet. You have to let them dry completely before the carts start rolling through them otherwise they look worse than they did when you started! She would take her time moseying through the store as if she had walked in 10 minutes after we opened at 7 am and had 13 hours to do her shopping. The night manager, Ferren, hated her as much as I did. He had a family, wife and kids, and wanted to get home as much as I did, even though home was never my final destination. Taco Johns was more like it. Ferren did what any reasonable authority would do in this type of situation: at 10pm he would politely make the announcement on the loudspeaker that the store was closing. At 10:05pm, he shut off the lights on her.

Despite the hint of disorientation as she entered the store, this lady apparently knew Kennedy’s Super Valu well enough that she could find her foodstuff necessities in the dark. I continually glanced up the aisles because I was sure that she was probably using a flashlight. Never caught her though. By this time the Lois had rolled in to count the drawer money and “do the books”. She was a first class bitch in my book, but her biweekly redeeming moment was when she wandered back in the dark to find our night owl shopper to (im)politely tell her to get the hell out of the store.

Even as she slow-rolled it up to the checkout counter, our Mrs. Frumpy didn’t have a clue that she was inconveniencing anyone. She managed to find three bags worth of groceries in 25 minutes of shopping, 10 minutes of it in the dark. After five more minutes of haggling over coupons and prices for what she believed to be damaged fruit, she finally got around to paying. By that time it was 10:15 and my friends outside are getting irritated. The Taco John’s parking lot was the place to hang out, not Super Valu.

In Iowa we carry the groceries out, it’s expected. In a parking lot that was empty with the exception of my truck, Ferren’s clunker, Lois’s Cadillac and my friend’s Ford Fairmont, the Thursday night hassle parked her late seventies sedan five rows back from the front door. Maybe she was expecting a rush on green seedless grapes? I pushed the cart out and fidgeted with my dirty white apron while she worked to get the door unlocked and open the back door. The same thing happened every week so I knew what was coming. Even in the dim parking lot light I could see that her car was full of crap, all the way up past the windows. She fussed in the back seat for a moment. “Just put them right here,” she said, smiling. “Right here” was a space of about 10x20 inches for three paper bags of groceries and two gallons of milk.

During my first month at Super Valu I tried to delicately make the groceries fit, digging a little bit more of a hole on my own to try to make it work. It was no easy task and I was always a little nervous about what I might uncover. But it didn’t take long for this lady to wear on my nerves enough that the niceties ended. After awhile I just shoved the groceries into her car with as much force as necessary. Mike the owner, Lois the bookkeeper, and Ferren the manager were pretty big on customer service, but this lady irritated all of us, a common enemy. So I was able to get away with it.

Driving away five minutes later I forgot about her… until the next Thursday.