The Price Chopper

She’s the girl with tired skin who’s always there at Price Chopper with her smart face and with her grocery store air. It says: This is where I belong, who my family is, for what it’s worth, this is more like my home than any home I’ve had, here on Sunday after Thanksgiving, making myself useful. She’s not particularly friendly to the customers—the worried dark-haired girl with an infant in a carrier in her shopping cart, the bent-over scowling thin crab of a woman slowly following her adult daughter through the aisles, the thick hard man in his mid-thirties, wearing tight large rugby clothes, his hands in fists, his head darting here and there, me, a real regular old fart in glasses and jeans and dirty cap, just hoping as I always do for someone who’ll make eye contact. No, she’s locked into her world where she belongs, locked into the aisles and the counters and the vegetable bins spraying water over her hands fussing over the broccoli, locked into gossip with the jawing woman arranging flowers in the florist cubicle, telling in-jokes to the manager in produce with the headset to her ears, her small manager eyes darting here and there and her pouty dry lips snapping orders into a mouthpiece, rushing on tiptoe to soothe the flush-faced general manager who is also talking to a headset and knitting his brows with his greased hair and starched-white shirt and shiny orange tie that matches his complexion. But finally, my smart-faced girl ends up cashing out my mother-in-law at the register, whom I’ve known half-a-century, who is slowing these last few years but still a-twinkle, making people stop for a moment so the girl who has ignored me and others all these months with her smart face and grocery store air and in-jokes, on this Sunday after Thanksgiving relaxes, stops for a moment and smiles when my clever mother-in-law asks her name: “Molly,” she says and we all twinkle, just for a moment.