Supermarket(14)

I felt terror but also comfort. I rinsed my face once more and looked down at the newspaper next to the sink. Muldoon’s Grocery was circled in red.

I’d head there in the morning to fill out an application and hopefully get a job that would inspire me to finish this book once and for all.

But by now you know I got that job.

Now that you’re all caught up, we can finish that eureka moment I was having walking with Frank through aisle nine.





CHAPTER 5


AISLE NINE


“Are you listening to me?” Frank said. “You look pretty zoned out right now, and I’m trying to school you with this knowledge!”

The weird part? Everything he was saying, all the information he was blurting out, I felt like I knew it subconsciously. You see, Frank seemed to always have bits of information, like a walking Snapple cap. Imagine all the shit you learn throughout your life, the things your brain keeps locked—spelling, family faces, pattern recognition, first hand job under the bleachers freshman year, visual and spatial processing—all stuff for your survival.

Then there’s the shit you “learn” but don’t retain—factoring and linear equations, what you had for breakfast three days ago, nutritional information about bananas . . .

Now, Frank, his brain was like entirely subconscious.

The shit a normal brain is supposed to throw away, it’s like Frank’s kept it, replacing the main things you need with the clutter of his own subconscious. And that was another unique reason he was perfect for my novel.

“Flynn!” he yelled.

“Oh, sorry, man, I was just thinking about—”

Oh no, I thought, stopping myself midsentence. I couldn’t tell him what I was doing. Why I was really here.

“Thinking about what?” asked Frank.

If I said more, I would blow my cover as an undercover author, potentially ruining my chances of finishing this book. So, I said the first thing that came to mind that was sure to distract him.

“Ever fuck that girl?” I asked, pointing to a girl who had apparently been hired the month before.

“Who, Cara? Oh, yeah, man. Two days in, I polished that off.”

Cara worked in the coffee shop at the end of the store, the one by aisle twelve. Cara was maybe twenty-three, blond, and short, and seemed very sweet. She had piercing eyes, full lips, and hair in a tight ponytail, and she wore brown knee-high boots. Kind of dumb-looking, maybe, like a bimbo who gets by on her looks—but she was intelligent. Just naive-seeming.

“One of the tightest I’ve slayed in my time here,” Frank continued. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected this. I thought he’d drone on about how he would do her, or had planned to, but the fact that he already had? That was crazy to me.

Either way, my question distracted him from what had been on my mind—writing this novel. As we walked to the front of the store, he elaborated on their sexcapades, explaining how they went in the back storage area one evening after closing when no one was around. He went on about this little cupcake tattoo just under her left breast, right above her rib cage. I asked him to describe the tattoo, gripping my pen. It was a pink cupcake tattoo with blue sprinkles, he explained, with two cartoon eyes and a smile to match the little arms and legs. By the time I finished writing this down, we’d reached the front customer service area.

“How you finding your first day, child?” Ronda said.

“It’s going pretty all right, I suppose,” I replied. “Just kinda getting to know the pla—”

At that moment, a door opened behind her.

The customer service area was a ten-by-ten-foot room. There was an eight-foot-long counter built into the wall that separated Ronda from the customers who came to her for help. At the end of the counter, where she sat, was a latch that allowed the table to lift up—it was attached to the wall like a drawbridge that could be retracted over a moat leading to the king’s castle.

In the corner of the room, behind Ronda, a man walked through, mumbling in Spanish—Hector. Hector was a thirty-four-year-old first-generation Mexican American security guard at Muldoon’s. He was overweight and wore a white short-sleeved button-down, a black tie, and a metal badge on his left breast. His slacks were deep blue with black stripes down the sides, and they were accompanied by a utility belt containing his flashlight, baton, and empty handcuff pouch—it was technically illegal for him to detain anyone. At the end of the day, he had no jurisdiction, was just a scarecrow Ted Daniels hired at $10.75 an hour to patrol the aisles, scaring teenagers before they mustered the courage to lift something.

“Hola, Vernon,” Hector said to an armed guard who had sneaked past me without my realizing it.

“Oh, good! Right on time!” said Ted, who was walking up right then.

At the end of every month, on the twenty-eighth at 4:00 p.m. sharp, Vernon came to relieve the store of the roughly one hundred thousand dollars in cash it had made in the month. Until then, it was held securely in a Summerfold safe in Hector’s security office, right next to the monitors that displayed a closed-circuit security camera feed. With the exception of a few blind spots, the entire store was covered—not only the aisles, but outside too, including the front parking lot and back loading dock where Frank took his frequent smoke breaks.

“How’s your day, Ted?” Vernon asked. He was in his sixties, short and frail for his age, with white hair hiding under his work hat and a bit of a limp in his left leg. His partner, Gary, was the one who drove the armored truck. Gary never left his position.