Goodbye To All That (15 page)

Wade Smith apparently did, unless he was an adulterer. He didn’t look like one. Who’d cheat on her husband with a guy with hardware poking through his face like Frankenstein’s monster?

She shouldn’t think poorly of him. Thanks to him, she was clocked in and ka-chinging. Thanks to him, a minute later, she was standing in front of a rack of combination locks in the housewares section, and a minute after that she was at the front counter, paying for it, presenting her employee card at Wade’s urging so she could receive her ten-percent employee discount. Fifty-eight cents was fifty-eight cents. And since she was now supporting herself, she had to watch every penny.

“Always keep your employee card with you,” Wade said once they were back in the staff room and Ruth had her coat and purse stored safely inside a locker. She’d been about to slip the card inside her purse before setting it on the locker shelf, but he’d stopped her in time. “The card opens the staff door so you don’t have to buzz in. And if you want to pick up something, like for lunch, you need your card to get the discount.”

The food First-Rate sold didn’t qualify as lunch in Ruth’s mind. Chips, pretzels, cookies, soda, mixed nuts that looked like mostly peanuts
 . . .
The most nutritious edible they sold was processed American cheese. She’d figured that if she had enough time, she’d buy lunch at the sandwich shop three stores down, and if she didn’t she’d skip lunch and make up for it at dinner.

She didn’t want to be a snob, though. If all the other employees ate First-Rate junk food for lunch, she’d do her best to fit in. Maybe she could buy a cup of yogurt and some crackers. Or she could bring her own lunch in a brown bag, just like when she was a schoolgirl, only with two cookies.

“Today you’ll just do stock,” Wade informed her. “By next week Francine’ll have you doing check-out. But everyone starts with stock.”

“Is that how you started?” Ruth asked, once again following him out of the staff room. “You must be, what, the assistant manager?”

“Who, me?” Wade snorted.

“Well, since you were assigned to train me—”

“Until this morning, I was the most recent hire,” he said. “Now you’re the most recent hire.”

So training the new arrival was a task for the staff member with the least seniority. Ruth wondered how long she’d be working here before she’d be responsible for training the next new hire. She liked the idea that she’d soon know enough about First-Rate to train another rookie.

“With stock,” Wade explained, “what you do is wander up and down the aisles, and when you see we’re out of something or running low, you come back here—” he gestured toward the shelves of inventory “—and ask Frank or Carlo to get it for you. They’re the stock guys, and they’re
 . . .
” He peered around for a minute, then wandered around one of the shelves and spotted an open door leading to another parking lot outside, behind the store. “Yeah. They’re unloading a truck right now. But, okay, so you ask them to get you the athlete’s foot ointment or the toothpicks or whatever. By the end of the week you’ll know where all the stuff is on these shelves, but Frank and Carlo flip out if anyone touches their precious inventory without their permission. Trust me—you don’t want to get on their bad side. They’re, like, nuts.”

Ruth nodded. Nuts she could handle. The world was filled with nuts.

“So Frank gets you the toothpicks or the candy corn or whatever, and you bring it out on one of these trucks.” He pointed to a couple of wheeled carts parked near the door into the store. “The trick is, you don’t want to go back and forth a million times, so you do a few aisles and then come back and get a bunch of stuff at once. Or if you don’t have anything going on in the store, you come back here and find a truck already full of stuff—” he gestured toward one of the carts, which was stacked with bottles of vitamins, calcium supplements, and assorted other nutritional pills “—and you wheel it out into the store and restock the shelves.”

The weird hair and eyebrow hardware notwithstanding, Wade seemed like a nice boy. If only he were a little older and better groomed, and had a better job and a more believable last name than Smith and no metal puncturing his face, she could introduce him to Melissa. A sales clerk at a convenience store didn’t exactly sound like someone on the fast track, but Ruth was a sales clerk at a convenience store, and she was a fine person. And that guy Melissa had brought to Massachusetts with her last week, Lucas Brondo, was a beautician, which in Ruth’s estimation wasn’t that many rungs above a convenience store clerk. Even if he was a Manhattan beautician. Even if he was a good-looking Manhattan beautician who’d worked wonders on Melissa’s hair.

A First-Rate clerk could buy Melissa all kinds of hair gels and mousses and conditioners and use his employee discount. Manhattan beauticians weren’t the only route to pretty hair.

Not that Wade Smith was the boy for Melissa. He was too young. Too scruffy. And she’d bet good ka-ching that he didn’t play the piano. A waste of those long, graceful fingers.

“So, let’s do this truck,” Wade said, pushing the cart with the nutritional supplements out into the store. Ruth trailed behind him. En route to the pharmacy corner of the store, he introduced her to several clerks whose names blurred and blended together. One had a Spanish-sounding name—Rosita or Rosalita or something—and one reminded Ruth of a gym teacher Jill and Melissa had had at high school. The pharmacist looked like something out of a magazine ad, youthful and clean-scrubbed and smiling as if to say, “I can sell you great drugs,” which was pretty much what he did.

One clerk was a man past retirement age, balding and short, with bits of white hair growing out of his ears like lint, and thick-lensed bifocals, the top halves of which magnified his eyes in a creepy kind of way. Ruth hoped he wouldn’t decide they should be friends because she was closer in age to him than to the rest of the staff. Everyone else appeared on the young side of forty.

Maybe they weren’t so young. Maybe they just looked good because they gobbled vast quantities of the pills on the cart she was pushing. Ginseng. Echinacea. St. John’s Wort. Ginkgo Biloba. So many products, and Ruth had no idea what any of them were used for. She hoped a customer wouldn’t ask her. What could she say to someone who approached her in her official-looking apron and inquired about what to take for a failing memory? Ruth would have to answer, “I don’t remember. My memory’s going, too.”

The hell with all these herbal things, these mysterious elixirs and their miraculous promises, she thought as she surveyed the contents of the cart. She’d stick with her plain, old-fashioned multivitamin. A multivitamin and homemade chicken soup could cure just about anything, as far as she was concerned.

Wade set her up in the aisle near the pharmacy and told her to replenish the supplies of pills. “Put the newer bottles in back and pull the older bottles forward so we can sell the older bottles first,” he instructed her.

She suppressed a smile. Whenever she shopped, she always checked the expiration dates of the items stashed in the rear on the shelves. For the same sixteen-ninety-nine—geez, the black cohosh was expensive, so much money for such a small bottle—why should she buy an old, stale item from the front of the shelf if a more recent, fresher item lurked behind it?

He watched her place a couple of bottles of garlic extract on the shelf, then backed up a step, and another step, as if he wanted to leave but was hesitant to take his eyes off her.

“I can handle this,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound overconfident. She
could
handle it. For decades, she’d been unloading bags of groceries and organizing the cans of pureed tomato and boxes of corn flakes inside her cabinets. She knew how to put things on a shelf.

Wade nodded, tucked a clump of stringy hair behind his ear and shuffled off, calling over his shoulder, “Find me if you need anything.”

Abruptly she discovered herself alone in the nutritional supplements aisle. What if she did need something? What if she couldn’t find him? Was she really ready to fly solo?

For God’s sake. Of course she was. She was a competent woman. She’d purchased a platform bed and a futon couch without any input from Richard. She’d bought a coffee maker, read the instruction manual and set the clock and timer up, all by herself. She’d been living alone for a week and hadn’t discovered anything she couldn’t handle.

It took her only a couple of minutes to find the area on the shelf for flaxseed oil gel caps. She pulled out the older bottles and started loading the new bottles at the back. A rumbling voice reached her from behind: “The pills are easy. Wait ’til you’ve got to do the beach toys. Bend, stretch, bend, stretch—it’s like an aerobics workout.”

She turned to find the short, balding man standing behind her. What was his name? Barney? Harvey? Five minutes ago she’d been introduced to him and she couldn’t remember. She ought to take some of that cohosh stuff, or the ginko biloba.

Smiling politely, she said, “I guess they’re starting me slowly. They’ll get to the aerobics my second day.”

“Beach toys are gone for the season, anyway. The Halloween stuff is out, and the day after Halloween, we’ll have to pull whatever is left and set up the Christmas stuff.”

“No Thanksgiving merchandise?”

“Oh, yeah, some. Not much. That area is for toys. We sell lots of Halloween paraphernalia, lots of stocking stuffers, but what kind of toys would you sell for Thanksgiving?”

“Stuffed turkeys?” she joked.

He laughed.

His smile pleased her. She tried to remember the last time she’d become friends with someone new and came up empty. The same old friends, ladies from the neighborhood, from the B’nai Torah Sisterhood, from her volunteer work, from the tennis club she’d joined because Richard had wanted her to get exercise, even though she was the world’s worst tennis player . . . Friends she knew as Richard’s wife. This man, like Wade and Rosita and the others, belonged to her alone. They were her friends—or they would be, if she decided she liked them and they decided they liked her. They would befriend her as Ruth, not as someone’s wife or mother or grandmother.

“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing this was not a good way to start a friendship. “I don’t remember your name.”

“Bernie,” he said. “Bernard O’Hara to the police and the tax man, Bernie to everyone else. And you’re Ruth, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You retired?” he asked, gathering a handful of bottles labeled Calcium Citrate and carrying them to the calcium area of the shelf.

“Retired?” She remained busy with the flaxseed. “No. I just started working here.”

“I meant, retired from another job. Like me. The accounting firm I worked at had a mandatory retirement age, but I wasn’t done yet. I wasn’t ready to get sent out to pasture. Not me, no sir. I worked for a year as a bagger at the Stop & Shop up the street but hated it. So I came here. First-Rate is much better.”

“What did you hate about Stop & Shop?” she asked, surprised to find herself genuinely curious.

“All that food. All that gluttony. You’d see a young mother buying candy and soda and sugary cereals for her toddlers and want to lecture her. Or someone using food stamps to buy potato chips. It drove me crazy. Besides, bagging is dreary work. Here you get to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And what a great group of people you get to work with.”

Yes. New friends
, Ruth thought. She wasn’t going to have time to see her old friends now that she was working full time. No more luncheons. No more kaffeeklatches that were supposed to focus on fundraising for the synagogue but instead were mostly just excuses to gossip:
Did you hear about Edna’s father, with the Alzheimer’s? They found him in his underwear
Sunday morning, walking along the shoulder of the Mass Pike. And Marsha’s granddaughter, the bassoonist? She got accepted into the New England Conservatory’s after-school program. And that rumor I heard about Lillian and Al getting a divorce? True.

Now Ruth’s old friends were probably having kaffeeklatches and whispering about her and Richard, saying, True.