Ralph Benton

Lancelot of the Mart

From the register John watched the girl circling the aisles of the Sunshine Food Mart, biting her thumb as she glanced at him. He figured she was waiting for the line to go down before she approached, but she didn’t have a basket, and in fact she wasn’t carrying anything at all. Did she want to talk? The morning rush began to taper off, as the construction workers, bros, and commuters bought their sandwiches, Red Bulls, and coffees.

He smiled at her a couple of times, to apologize for the short-staffing, and to show her he was harmless. Just a middle-aged guy, medium height, thinning hair, who found himself running a register. Maybe she was looking for condoms or lube, and didn’t want to talk to Jake in the deli. For one thing, Jake was always busy back there, and for another he looked (and, truthfully, was) kind of pervy.

But 9:30 on a Tuesday morning wasn’t usually when girls came in for that stuff. Usually Friday or Saturday afternoon, before their dates showed up to take them to bar hop on Boyle Street. This girl didn’t look like she was going on a date. Quite the opposite. She looked anti-feminine, like she was doing her best to hide any girlish part of her. Baggy sweatpants, too-long hoodie, hair under a cap, no makeup. Maybe she should have worn makeup, because her face was red and puffy, and every few minutes she wiped her eyes with a sleeve.

John decided, a girl in trouble. He wondered, as he almost always did when a young girl came in, about Cassie. He told himself, as he almost always did when he thought about Cassie, that this time he really would get out the email address Melissa had written out for him on that sticky note, and ask her about their daughter.

He finished ringing up Nora Rae, who came in every couple of days to spend her social security on scratch-offs and smokes, and then the front of the store was empty. The girl looked around, took a breath, and bounced to get herself moving. John gave her his warmest you-can-trust-me smile when she walked up.

“Morning, miss, I’m sorry we’ve been busy, what can I do for you?”

She smiled in the way of young girls, who smile automatically to make things ok, but her eyes held nothing but fear. She scrunched her hands in the long sleeves and leaned forward. “Do you guys carry, uh, the, uh, morning after pill?” Her voice was shallow, and husky from the crying, and she flamed crimson in embarrassment.

John’s heart sank. After the last election the state had essentially outlawed abortion, and he’d heard the Planned Parenthood clinic had shut down a few months ago. Sure he knew that girls sometimes needed help and couldn’t get it. He just never thought they would show up at his register and have to ask a wretched old fool like him for something so intimate. He felt helpless and useless, as he always did when Cassie came home in tears. He remembered her look, just like this girl: do something, just please help me!

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he whispered back. “We don’t carry anything like that. Just the condoms and stuff.”

“Yeah, I figured,” she said. He hoped she wouldn’t start crying in front of him. “Um, what about–” She pulled her phone out of the sleeve and looked at some page she had found. “What about, like, pennyroyal or licorice root? I mean, you’ve got some stuff…” She trailed off, and we both looked at the little display of aspirin and bullshit hangover cures.

John wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but if she was looking for a morning-after pill at least he wasn’t so stupid to think that a man’s touch would help.

“No, no, we’re just a food mart. Half of this stuff is probably blackmarket and expired anyway.” He tried a laugh, and she gave a quick half-smile. “What about the organic market? They’ve got a bunch of stuff in their wellness aisle, or whatever they call it. Maybe you could find something there?”

She seemed to shrink even further into the hoodie. “That’s where my mom works,” she said. “I can’t, I just can’t.” She looked around the little mart, looking for an answer that wasn’t there. A tear slid down her face and she absently wiped it away with the sleeve.

“Maybe your boyfriend can help, maybe he could find what you need in the wellness aisle. Does your mom know him?”

“Oh, she knows him,” the girl said with a sudden fury. “She’s married to him.”

She fled to the front door and parked herself on the yellow metal bench out front. She wrapped her arms around her shins and stared at the cemetery across the road.

John stood there, paralyzed with all the old feelings that came up like an unflushable turd. Useless, stupid, wishy-washy, a failure. He wanted to do something, so he brought out a can of green tea and set it beside her on the bench. She didn’t acknowledge him and he went back inside to keep the register ringing.

He noticed that she had taken off the hoodie, with nothing but a purple sports bra underneath. John didn’t like that. A food mart with two pumps of off-brand gasoline was no place for a slim young girl to be showing herself. Sure enough, around lunchtime a pickup rolled in and two dudes piled out. Each one eyeballed the girl as they walked in and shared a wolfish grin as the doors closed behind them.

They bought chips, jalapeno jerky, dip, and a twelver of Natty Light. As John rang them up the tall one asked, “Yo, you know that tasty bit of sweetmeat out front?” The other snorted.

John flushed, in the spotlight, and he stammered out, “Oh, she’s-” my daughter, just say she’s my daughter “-a friend, she likes to hang out here.”

“A friend, huh, that’s nice.”

John nodded, feeling better, now that he was doing something, helping.

“So, what’s your friend’s name?”

In the face of John’s humiliated silence the tall one smiled scorn, taking a bully’s pleasure in catching out John in his sad little lie. He dropped exactly one penny in the change plate and sauntered outside. 

It was the smaller one, with his blonde hair in a ponytail, who started to chat up the girl. John thought, C’mon guys, she’s only fourteen or fifteen. But they kept smiling and laughing, and pretty soon so was she. When she offered the blonde guy a drink of her tea, Cassie’s face finally pushed John out the door.

“Hey, miss, uh, I can call and get you a ride, anywhere you need, no problem.”

She didn’t meet his gaze, but the tall dude didn’t give her a chance to take the offer.

“Thanks cashier-man, ah, ‘John’, John-boy,” he smirked. “Yeah, no, Maddie says she wants to take a ride with us. We’ll take her to where she needs to go.”

When John didn’t move he stepped forward hard. Youth and arrogance pushed, the familiar bloom of fear pulled, and John was back in the mart.

“Is that true, Maddie, you want to go with them?” he managed, but the door shut in his face.

They all climbed into the truck, with Maddie in the middle. Someone said something and the guys laughed, but Maddie did not. They drove off.

At home, after his shift, John thought she might have looked back at him as they drove away, then decided she hadn’t. Why would she?