The View from Mount Joy (19 page)

“I don’t suppose Kristi’s going to show up,” I said as our salad plates were being taken away.

Mrs. Casey looked like she was just about ready to choke, but instead of a piece of lettuce, a laugh escaped from her.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. Leaning toward me, she whispered, “You heard how she’s turned into some kind of religious nut, haven’t you?”

I nodded. “Kirk sent me the newspaper clipping.”

She shook her head and laughed again, which caused a little frisson of laughter between the three of us.

“Something funny?” asked one of the tan diamond ladies.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Casey, “you have no idea.”

What had happened? Kirk had no idea; distance and a general antipathy had done his relationship with his sister no favors.

“I thought we might, you know, get closer once we got older,” he had told me. “But it didn’t happen. She just wasn’t interested.”

I’d seen her a couple of times after that weekend northern lights extravaganza, but it seemed as if our relationship, or whatever it was, had peaked, and she didn’t come back to Minneapolis after she graduated. In fact, I don’t know where she went; the random phone calls and postcards had virtually stopped.

She did come home for her dad’s funeral but left immediately afterward.

“I think she’s avoiding me,” I’d told Kirk.

“She’s avoiding everybody,” Kirk had said bitterly. “You’d think she’d stick around for a day or two—I mean, our dad did just
die.
But no, she’s got more important things to do.”

What those more important things were, she wasn’t telling. Mrs. Casey told me every now and then that Kristi called her, but never offered many details.

“Honestly, I’d love to tell you, Joe, but I can’t tell what I don’t know. It’s like she checks in to make sure I’m still breathing, and then says she’s gotta run. The last phone call I got, she was in California.”

“What part of California? What’s she doing for work?”

“I don’t know, and all she said was that she was temping.”

As much fun as I’d had with Kristi, her absence in my life wasn’t an aching one. She was sort of like a carnival—a lot of fun, but if I spent every day with her, I’d be exhausted. And probably have a stomachache.

As I watched Nance waltz with her father and Kirk dance with Mrs. Casey, I felt sorry for Kristi, who couldn’t be bothered to quit drumming for Christ or whatever it was she was doing now to come to her only brother’s wedding.

The big surprise in my life, besides getting Darva and Flora as roommates, was that I was warming up to my life as a grocer. It was like being mayor of a little town—a little town of food—and my goal was to keep everything running smoothly while pleasing my customers, who complained just like constituents. But they didn’t just complain, they confided—man, they told me things that turned my ears red, and all during conversations that had started with a question about the best roast to serve their mother-in-law or whether there was a toilet bowl cleaner that
really
worked.

It was the tameness I had been so afraid of, the way the words “I run a grocery store” fell like lead weights when asked by women I met in bars what I did for a living. Not that I hung out in bars much; before Darva I went out once in a while with friends from high school or the U, but I seemed so busy with the store, with Ed in those last weeks, and with the house I had just bought (a mile from my mother, six blocks from my aunt, and three blocks from the store—man, I was knotted in apron strings from all directions), and after Darva and Flora moved in, my search for
the one
seemed propelled by an idling engine rather than one turbo-charged. I had had a couple girlfriends over the years, but our relationships always seemed to have the heft of a feather pillow and never became more, as my mother said, than passing fancies. Since Kelly the weirdo, I hadn’t dated anyone who wanted to reenact a movie with me, although I’d had to break up with Marcia, a dental hygienist, when she flossed her teeth one too many times in front of me (“Don’t come crying to me,” she said when I gave her the it’s-time-to-see-other-people speech, “when you’re wearing dentures and I’ve still got all my beautiful
clean
teeth”), and Rhonda was as needy as a rescued dog, only you couldn’t wrestle or play fetch with her. Sandy, who had scored a perfect mark on her math SATs and was a member of Mensa, liked to remind me of both, and dropped me after we played our third chess game.

“Hey, just because I beat you doesn’t mean I cheat,” I said. “Maybe you’re not as smart as you tell me you are.”

I was resigned. I still thought the perfect woman was waiting for me somewhere; I just hoped she wouldn’t give up waiting, because I sure was having a hard time finding her.

I wasn’t like Charlie Olsen, who claimed he only dated women willing to have sex at least three times a day. “And if even if they meet my quota, sometimes I go hunting for a little recreational pussy on the side.” I’d see Charlie in the store with his bossy girlfriend (“Not that pizza, Charlie, the one we’ve got the double coupon for!”) and I couldn’t quite see her agreeing to his quota, let alone meeting it. Phil Lamereau, another guy I’d played hockey with in high school, came in one day asking if we had a pharmacy in the store. When I told him no, he swore.

“Damn, I need this prescription filled,” he said, waving around a slip of paper. “I’ve got the clap again—for the second time.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Don’t tell my wife.”

Even Leonard Doerr, who had stopped in the store at Christmas, was getting a lot of action.

“This is my wife, Helga,” he said, introducing me to the tall, attractive woman at his side. “We’ve been living in Munich for three years—this is her first visit to America.”

“Well, I hope you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

“Vell, ve’re schleeping in Leonard’s childhoot bet,” she said, leaning on Leonard’s arm. “It’s been a bet zat’s wery hard to leave.”

I don’t know who blushed more, me or Leonard. Then, as they pushed their cart past the butcher case, he turned and mouthed the words: “She’s an animal!”

Darva got a big laugh out of that one.

“Good old Leonard Doerr,” she said, helping herself to a cup of coffee.

“You should have seen his wife,” I said. “She was hanging all over him, and you could tell she was just waiting to get him back in ‘zat childhoot bet.’”

We were both looking out the office window to the store below, where Flora was being entertained up front by one of my cashiers. Darva walked her to the store nearly every afternoon, and Flora had become a favorite of my staff, who took turns pushing her around in a cart (“It’s cheaper than Disneyland,” Darva said) and playing with her.

“I love surprises like that. When the guy whose nickname was ‘Class Nerd’ turns into an international playboy—”

“Well,” I interrupted, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Darva laughed. “You sound jealous.”

“Maybe. His Frau
was
good-looking.” I shook my head. “What’s happening to the world when a guy like me can be jealous of a guy like Leonard Doerr?”

“I’d think lots of people might be jealous of Leonard,” said Darva with a little sniff. “He’s living his dream.”

“You’re right,” I said, thinking of Leonard back in homeroom making his German-club announcements.

“Hey, it must be Ole Bull reunion day,” said Darva. “Look who just came in.”

Shannon Saxon was folding one crying kid into the front of a grocery cart while trying to prevent another from breaking free of her grasp and tearing off through the aisles.

“Did you know her husband’s having an affair with his receptionist?” said Darva.

I would have done a spit take had I had coffee in my mouth.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“From Shannon. In the park yesterday. I told you I see her there every now and then. Flora and Joshua play together.”

A question flickered briefly in my head:
How do the receptionist’s breasts stack up next to Shannon’s?

“
Il est un cochon,
” said Darva.

Startled for a moment, thinking she had just read my mind, I smiled weakly before offering,
“Mais oui.”

Darva handed me her coffee cup. “I think I’ll go down and say hello. Care to join me?”

I shook my head. I felt bad for Shannon but knew that nothing I might say was going to make her feel better. She confessed her marital problems to Darva, but that didn’t mean she wanted me apprised of them.

Sitting behind my desk, I could still see what was happening on the floor, but customers looking up at the window couldn’t so easily see me. I watched as Darva approached Shannon and gave her that double-cheeked French greeting kiss. Flora, who was “helping” rearrange a candy display with Eileen, my head cashier, saw her mother and ran over to her. I watched as Darva swooped her up, and Shannon, smiling, reached over to cup the little girl’s head in her hand, even as one of her kids wailed and the other started jumping, as if he were spring-loaded, even as her marriage was falling apart. I was taken by these two women who hadn’t had anything to do with each other in high school but who now as mothers understood each other in a way I never would. Shannon’s big muscular chiropractor husband had once bragged to me that he liked to do push-ups with a ten-pound weight on his back, and I thought how he, how I, how
men
were big and strong on the outside but didn’t know crap, how the women with their soft skin and curves could take us any day, in ways that really counted.

I thought of my own mother and how on the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death she’d taken me to see
The Shakiest Gun in the West
because Don Knotts had been one of my dad’s favorite actors and had said, “I think it would honor your dad if we had a good laugh.” The movie, in fact, had been pretty hokey, and my mother asked me in the car going home if I’d thought it had been funny, and I said no, and that made us both sad enough to cry, which was the only thing that night that made us laugh.

Suddenly I switched on the microphone and spoke into it.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” I said, with the practiced congeniality I used when announcing specials. “I hope everyone’s enjoying shopping at Haugland Foods.”

There were only three other shoppers besides Shannon and Darva, and they continued their hunting and gathering down the aisles.

“Now, most of you know that Mother’s Day is in May.”

I saw Mrs. Nelson, in aisle seven, look up at the window, as if by seeing me she might have a better answer to the question that was on her face:
What the hell are you talking about?

“But here at Haugland Foods, we like to honor mothers any time of the year—”

Mrs. Kirkpatrick, whose hair I had never seen out of rollers, stopped pushing her cart to give me the same look Mrs. Nelson had.

“—by giving you a free two minutes of shopping. Yes, ladies, whatever groceries you’ve already got in your cart, shove them to one side, because you’re going to have to pay for those. But when I ring the bell, all the groceries you’re able to grab within two minutes are free. I’ll ring the bell again when it’s time to stop.”

Everyone, including my cashiers and baggers, looked up at the window. For a moment it seemed as if I was looking at statues in some weird shoppers’ wax museum. No one moved.

Glancing at my watch, I rang the bell—the kind found on a motel desk, and the one I always rang to announce a special—and the wax figures suddenly melted out of their torpor.

Darva pointed to herself and mouthed, “Me too?” and when I nodded, she raced toward the shopping carts, holding Flora under her arm like a rag doll.

Mrs. Nelson, who was conveniently at the butcher case, began throwing steaks and pounds of hamburger into her cart. Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who was in the cereal aisle, knocked boxes of Froot Loops and canisters of oatmeal into her cart. Another woman whom I didn’t know grabbed soup and tuna and other canned goods before turning into the frozen foods aisle.

Shannon was in the bakery section, lobbing boxes of donuts and bags of cookies into her cart. Her son Joshua was helping, standing on his tiptoes and pulling coffee cakes off the shelf. The toddler in the cart had stopped crying and was clapping his hands, urging his brother on.

I found I was laughing maniacally, and my cackling only increased when I grabbed my guitar, turned it on, and started playing “Brown Sugar” into the mike. Darva looked up at me, laughing too.

Even though I was into the music and watching the frantic motion below, I was keeping an eye on my watch, and after two minutes had gone by, I strummed a final chord and tagged the bell. Like extras in a science fiction movie, everyone froze, as they waited for the visiting alien to speak.

“Excellent job, ladies,” I said into the mike, lowering my voice like a late-night DJ. “Now remember, you’re on the honor system, so please pay for the groceries you’d already gotten before our little Supermarket Sweep. All the others, of course, are free…and a tribute to the special mothers you are. Thank you for your patronage, and have a wonderful day.”

I turned off the mike and disappeared into the back of my office, where I couldn’t be seen. I was trying to figure out when I had felt the way I was feeling now, and then I remembered—it was when I’d scored my first goal for the Golden Gophers.