“Is that the last Frosty Fortune?” she said, right over my mother-in-law’s head.
Joan was standing in THIRTY-SIX eggs when she said it.
She never looked down at them.
Not ONCE.
My husband’s heart quit in our driveway fourteen months ago, while he was scraping frost off the windshield.
He was forty.
Todd left me two boys, a mortgage that doesn’t care, and his mother.
Joan sold her little house after the funeral and moved into our back bedroom.
We were both wrecked.
She’s the gentlest person I know, and in fourteen months we haven’t had one bad word.
Money is another story.
I put gas in ten dollars at a time.
Last week Joan asked me to drive her to the Vander Wal’s in Pella.
Todd’s birthday was coming, the first one without him.
She wanted to make his angel food cake.
Fourteen egg whites, and he ate it standing up at the counter every year of his life.
Our cart had a wheel that shook, so she carried the two cartons herself, one flat on each palm.
Eighteen eggs apiece.
We got in lane four.
She always gets in lane four, if Gloria is on the register.
Eleven years of this.
Every trip she hands Gloria something wrapped in foil, slid under the divider, and neither of them says a word about it.
I asked once.
“She rings slow,” Joan said. “I like slow.”
I never bought that.
Then somebody came through between us and the candy rack.
An ELBOW, driven straight into Joan’s forearm.
Both cartons went.
Yolk went up her boots, the brown ones she’s had resoled twice.
Shell skidded under the magazine rack.
Joan didn’t move.
Since Todd, anything loud makes her go still.
She looked at the eggs like she’d dropped them on purpose.
I turned around to make somebody sorry.
It was Valerie.
Todd’s sister.
She quit this family six years ago.
Told us we’d never amount to anything, and she wasn’t going to wait around for it.
She laid a hundred-dollar bill flat on the belt.
“That one,” she said, pointing at the ticket case. “The last one.”
“Tear it off. I’ve got a car running.”
Somebody behind us said, “Did you see that?”
Nobody answered.
Joan said, “I’m sorry. I’ll find paper towels.”
Her own daughter stepped over the yolk to reach the counter.
“Leave it,” Valerie said. “They pay a kid for that.”
I was shaking so hard my keys rattled.
I figured she’d walk out clean.
She always has.
Gloria didn’t tear anything off.
She’s worked that register twenty-six years.
She knows half the county by their coupons.
She folded her arms.
She looked at the hundred, then at Valerie, and she laughed, low, like she’d heard a joke a long time ago.
Then she looked down at Joan’s boots.
And she said THREE WORDS that SHUT DOWN LANE FOUR.
The Hundred On The Belt
“Pick them up,” Gloria said.
She said it to Valerie, and she didn’t raise her voice to do it.
Valerie gave one short laugh through her nose.
“Excuse me?”
“The eggs.” Gloria kept her arms folded. “Your mother’s eggs. Pick them up off my floor, and then we can talk about a ticket.”
The man behind us bent down and set his basket on the tile.
Valerie looked at the hundred lying on the belt. Then she looked at Gloria’s name tag, the way you look at a license plate you mean to remember.
“You work a register,” she said.
“Twenty-six years,” Gloria said. “This one.”
She reached across, picked the bill up by one corner and laid it back on Valerie’s side of the divider bar.
Then she reached up and switched off the little light over lane four.
“Closed,” she said, to the whole line. “Except for these two.”
These two was us.
The woman behind the man with the basket said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and pushed her cart over to lane five. Nobody else moved.
Joan was still standing in the yolk with both hands in front of her, half cupped, like the eggs might come back up into them if she held still enough.
I got hold of her elbow. Her sleeve was wet through.
“It’s all right,” I said.
It wasn’t, and she knew it wasn’t, and she nodded anyway, because that’s what Joan does.
Gloria leaned over her counter and looked down at the floor for a long time. At the two cartons. At the shell under her magazine rack.
“Fourteen whites, Joan?” she said.
Joan’s mouth came open.
“Fourteen,” she said. “He liked it tall.”
“I know he did.”
Valerie said something then. The man with the basket said something back to her. The girl on lane five had swung all the way around on her stool to watch.
I didn’t hear any of it.
I was looking at Gloria.
I’d separated those whites next to Joan every year since my boys were born. I’d held the tube pan while she ran a knife around the edge. I’d never told a living soul how many eggs went into my husband’s birthday cake.
How did the woman on register four know?
Foil Under The Divider
The first time I saw the foil, Carter was asleep in the front seat of the cart with his hat pulled down over one eye.
Joan still drove herself back then. She met me at the store because her car had heat and mine had a hole in the floor mat I kept my feet off of.
She went through lane four. I went through behind her, because I didn’t know yet there was any other way to do it.
At the end of the belt she took a flat square of foil out of her purse and slid it under the rubber divider bar, onto Gloria’s side.
Gloria put it under her register without looking at it.
Neither one of them said a thing.
In the parking lot I said, “What was that?”
“Zucchini bread,” Joan said.
“For the checkout lady?”
“For Gloria,” Joan said. She got into her car, and that was all I got.
It kept on like that.
Banana bread. Scotcheroos. Molasses cookies when the weather turned. Rhubarb bars when her rhubarb came up behind the garage.
Whatever Joan had in the oven that week, one piece of it went into foil and under that divider bar.
And the week of Todd’s birthday, it was always a wedge of angel food.
I asked Todd about it once. He was on the couch with his boots off and a game on.
“She’s always done that,” he said, and turned it up.
I knew he’d bagged groceries at that store the summer he was sixteen. It was one of his stories. The lady who brought her parrot in a cage. The farmer who paid in silver dollars out of a coffee can.
He never said which lane.
I didn’t push. You don’t push that family. They get quiet on you, and they stay quiet.
Joan is seventy-one. She has paid her own way every day I’ve known her.
On the first of the month she’d sit at our kitchen table in her reading glasses with her checkbook and a stack of stamped envelopes.
Her phone. Her supplement insurance. The church. The paper.
And one more she always did last, and turned face down on the table before I got close enough to read the name.
I didn’t ask about that one either.
After the funeral she sold her house and moved into our back bedroom, and the envelopes came with her. First of every month. Four face up. One face down.
I figured it was flowers for Todd’s stone, or a pledge somewhere. It wasn’t my business, and I had my own envelopes.
The co-op bill was due that week.
I had the money for it in cash, a hundred and forty dollars in twenties. It was folded into the bill’s own return envelope, the one with the little plastic window, and zipped into the inside pocket of my coat.
I’d counted it twice in the parking lot before we went in.
That was the kind of year it had been.
That morning, while I got Mason’s shoes on, Joan wrapped a square of banana bread in foil and set it in the bottom of her navy tote.
Angel food would come later in the week. For now, banana bread.
By the end of that afternoon it would be the only thing in her bag still whole.
Two Hundred A Month
Valerie didn’t pick up the eggs.
She picked up the hundred instead and put it back in her wallet, slowly, so the whole line could watch her do it.
“Fine,” she said. “Keep your ticket. The gas station out by the highway has them.”
She didn’t leave.
She turned around and looked straight at me.
“So this is what you do now,” she said. “Haul her all over town with egg on her boots so people feel sorry for you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She sold that house.” Valerie said it louder, for the line. “Paid off. She lived in it my whole life, and she sold it and moved in with the widow. Where do you all think that money went?”
The man with the basket looked at me. So did the girl on lane five.
“Valerie,” Joan said.
“No. They should hear it.” Valerie pointed at me with her car keys. “I’m the bad guy, right? I’m the one who walked out. But she can’t even buy her own eggs without you driving her here and standing over her.”
I could feel the co-op envelope against my ribs, through my coat.
“It’s her money,” I said.
That was all I said.
Valerie smiled. It was Todd’s smile, the whole thing, right down to the crooked eyetooth, and I hated her for having it.
“You’re right,” she said. “It is her money. She sends me two hundred dollars of it every month.”
Lane four went quiet in a new way.
I looked at Joan.
Joan was looking at the floor.
The first of the month. Four envelopes face up. One face down.
Two hundred dollars, every month. The whole time I was putting gas in ten dollars at a time and telling Carter we’d see about new cleats in the spring.
The whole fourteen months.
I thought about the night in the spring I’d sat at that same table with a calculator and cried into a dish towel so the boys wouldn’t hear. Joan had come out of the back bedroom in her robe and put the kettle on and sat with me until the water boiled. She hadn’t said anything then either.
“She didn’t tell you.” Valerie laughed, and she sounded close to happy. “Oh, that’s good. She didn’t tell you.”
Joan’s hand had come out again, palm up, at nobody.
“So don’t stand there,” Valerie said, “and look at me like I’m the one taking from her.”
The man with the basket picked it back up off the floor. The girl on five turned back around on her stool.
Behind the counter, Gloria hadn’t moved, and she was looking at the navy tote on Joan’s wrist.
The Electric Money
Joan put her hand in the tote.
For a second I thought she was going for her checkbook. I thought she was going to write Valerie one right there on the belt, in front of everybody, to make it stop.
She brought out the foil.
It had gone flat on one side from riding at the bottom of the bag. She held it in both hands and looked at it like she’d forgotten what was inside.
Then she reached past the divider bar and set it on Gloria’s side of the belt, the same as she had every week for eleven years.
“Banana,” she said. “It’s a little dry this time. I’m sorry.”
Gloria picked it up.
She didn’t put it under her register. She held on to it.
“You’ve never once had to be sorry to me, Joan,” she said. “Don’t start in front of her.”
Valerie laughed.
Nobody laughed with her.
I unzipped my coat.
I took out the co-op envelope and put it on the belt next to where the foil had been.
“Two more cartons,” I said to Gloria. “Eighteen each. And her flour and sugar.”
Gloria looked down at the envelope. She knew what it was. Everybody in that town pays the co-op out of the same envelope.
Valerie knew it too.
“That’s your light bill,” she said.
I didn’t answer her.
Gloria leaned toward lane five and said something to the boy bagging there, and he went off toward the back at a jog.
She rang the flour. She rang the sugar.
When the boy came back with two cartons out of the cooler, cold enough to sweat on the belt, she opened each one and turned every egg in it with her thumb before she rang it.
I paid out of the envelope in twenties. She counted my change into my hand, and I folded it back in with what was left, and zipped it into my coat.
It went back in my pocket a lot thinner.
Valerie watched the whole thing with her keys in her fist.
“You’re going to sit in the dark,” she said, “to make me look bad.”
I handed Joan the first carton, and she held it flat on her palm, the way she’d held the others.
The Last Frosty Fortune
Valerie had more. She always does.
“You want to know why I left?” She wasn’t asking me. She was asking the line. “Because in that house there was Todd, and then there was everybody else. Todd’s ball games. Todd’s truck. Todd’s girlfriend, Todd’s wedding, Todd’s boys. I could have stood on the roof in a prom dress and she’d have asked me to come down so Todd could park.”
Joan didn’t look up.
“And then he goes and dies, and she packs up and moves in with her. With her. And I’m supposed to drive over on holidays and eat off a paper plate and act sorry.”
“Valerie,” Gloria said.
“I’m talking.”
“You’re doing it in my lane.”
“Six years.” Valerie turned back around to her. “Six years I’ve been out of that family, and she still mails me checks like I’m some charity she picked out of the church bulletin. You think I need her money? I’ve got a job. I’ve got a car out there that cost more than that house of hers.”
Joan said, “You cash them.”
It was the first thing she’d said to her daughter since the eggs.
Valerie stopped.
“Every one,” Joan said. “They come back from the bank with your name on the back.”
For a second Valerie didn’t have anything. I’d never seen that before. I don’t think anybody in lane four had.
Then she got it back.
“Fine. You know what? Fine.” She pulled the hundred out of her wallet again and slapped it on the belt. “Ring me up. I’ll pay for her damn eggs, if that’s what this is about. Give me the ticket.”
Gloria didn’t look at the bill.
“The last one stays where it is,” she said.
“You can’t do that.”
“I’m the one on the register,” Gloria said.
“I’ll talk to your manager. I’ll call the owners. I’ll have your job by the end of the day, lady, you watch me.”
Gloria set the foil down beside her cash drawer and folded her arms again.
“Twenty-six years,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Valerie stood there with her fingers on the bill.
The line behind her had stopped looking at the floor. They were looking at her boots, black and clean, not one drop on them.
She took the hundred and went.
She had to step over the eggs a second time to do it. She held the hem of her coat up out of the yolk with one hand.
The front doors slid open and shut behind her.
The last Frosty Fortune stayed in the case, behind the glass, and nobody in lane four asked for it.
Fourteen Whites
We made the cake that night.
Joan separated. She always separates.
She cracks each egg on the rim of the bowl and passes the yolk back and forth between the two halves of shell until the white has all run down. In all the years I’ve stood next to her, she has never once broken a yolk into the whites.
I held the bowl while she counted them out loud.
Fourteen.
Mason stood on a kitchen chair and wanted to know what we were doing with all the yellows. He’s nine. He wants to know what happens to everything.
“Custard,” Joan said. “Tomorrow.”
Carter came in, leaned on the fridge and watched the mixer go. He’s twelve. He watches more than he talks now, the way his dad did.
Nobody said Todd’s name. Nobody had to. The cake was his, and the kitchen smelled like every birthday he ever had in it.
It came out of the oven tall. Joan turned the tube pan upside down over the neck of a pop bottle to cool, the way her mother did it.
Mason wanted to eat his piece standing up at the counter.
Nobody told him not to.
In the morning I called the co-op.
I told the woman who answered that our payment would be late. I asked for ten days. She took my account number and typed for a while and said she’d put a note on it.
I have never in my life called that number about a late bill.
The note number is written on a scrap of paper on the side of the fridge, where I see it every time I get the milk out.
On the first of the month, Joan sat down at the kitchen table in her reading glasses with her checkbook and her stamps.
Her phone. Her supplement insurance. The church. The paper.
She licked each one and stacked them by her elbow.
There wasn’t a fifth.
She didn’t say anything about it, and neither did I.
The next week we drove back to the store and got in lane four.
Gloria was on.
Joan had the last wedge of the angel food at the bottom of her tote, wrapped in foil. At the end of the belt she got it out. Her hands were bad that day, and the foil shook.
I took it from her.
I slid it under the divider bar, onto Gloria’s side.
Gloria put it under her register without looking at it, and none of us said a word.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who drives a parent to the store every week.
For more stories about family drama and unexpected twists, you won’t want to miss My Sister Knocked with Josie’s Final Signing Already on the Calendar or I Unloaded Salt Blocks Overnight And My Parents Called It A Hobby, and for a tale of life’s curveballs, check out The Disconnect Notice Rode Beside The Claim Form The Whole Lunch.
