Richards

It was him or Tavvy. And Tavvy deserved to live. He deserved to live too but she had had enough. If his last act on this Earth was to spare her a little suffering he would die honorably. Kevin Claude was a good man and he wanted to end his life good. And giving up his life for another was pretty damn good.

It was Mrs. Richards. She was infamous at this point. The rookies heard about her early on, speaking in hushed whispers, like she was a ghost or something. In fact, there was a theory, one which Kevin had believed for a time, that she was a ghost—a ghost who could write checks. She came in regularly—once a week, usually on a Saturday—and her appearance never changed. Same clothes, same hair. She followed the same routine every time when it came to collecting her groceries. (Checkout was always a little different each time.) That was what ghosts did, wasn't it? Played out the same events over and over? It made Kevin wondered if he was a ghost.

He could take the repetition, though. Despite the repetition that she engaged in when it came to filling her cart, however, every time she came to check out was a moment in time that no mortal could properly prepare for. It took every ounce of a cashier's fortitude to check Mrs. Richards out without cracking. They used to let the rookies do it, even when the stories cropped up. (Back then they were warnings and not just idle gossip, as if you could gossip about a gorgon like it didn't exist.) But they started bleeding rookies, and had to tell the heads to pull her away from non-head lines if she started heading down them. She was too complicated for most of them to handle, even if they had good experience. They needed someone who could keep their head level. That was why they were “head” cashier, wasn't it?

Nevertheless, a certain bony chill came into Kevin's heart whenever he saw that she was shopping. Once, she could handle herself, but ever since she'd learned she could pester the employees endlessly and there was nothing they could do about it, things had never been the same. So as time went on, her shopping became less a shopping experience and more a guided tour through the lanes of groceries she'd navigated and memorized time and again...and again, and again. Product that was within arm's reach was suddenly Kevin's priority to grab. Hundreds upon hundreds of items were now all somehow too far away, too heavy to lift. There was one thing she said once, during one of the rare moments when she elaborated on her murky past, that growing up her family had had maids. Not a maid. Maids. Kevin could believe it, absolutely.

The standard transaction with Mrs. Richards went like this one tonight.

Mrs. Richards began wandering down a non-head cashier's aisle. He approached her swiftly, making full eye contact with the cashier, saying silently: It's okay. I've got you. “Mrs. Richards, I can help you over here.”

“Oh, Kevin! Thank goodness. These other cashiers don't know my methods.”

I was helping you five seconds ago—no need to forget I'm here, he thought to himself with a grin. “That's okay. Here, let me help you.”

Moving to one of the unused belts, he set the Closed sign on the metal edge at the end, and deliberately neglected to turn on the aisle light. No one knew what the light on the aisles meant anyway, and customers would flow down unlit aisles to tear up the break order just as soon as they'd stare at an empty lane with a lit bulb and a ready cashier, asking again and again, with mounting anxiety, “Are you open? Are you sure you're open?” That was before you got into those who would give a grunt as they knocked the Closed sign off onto the floor and expected service. So someone might try to come down here. Eleanor was on the belt ahead, though, and she knew Mrs. Richards, so if people started coming down she'd spot them and turn them back.

He remembered back in the day, when they'd leave the light on and the Closed sign off, and treat her as just a normal transaction. That was why he was praying so hard that people would see the sign, and the light. It was bad news for everyone involved if another customer came up behind Mrs. Richards. It was even worse when people tried to confront her, or tell her to hurry up. Mrs. Richards worked at her own pace; she put in a four-hour work day every time she was in here and she expected to be compensated for it by every stranger around her.

There was that time someone had even tried to use his—her—lane to get out of the store. “Oh, hang on, I see my husband,” she'd said. “I'm just gonna squeeze through here. Pardon me, ma'am.” And even as the sweat poured from Kevin so hard he seemed to sparkle like a Twilight vampire, she'd set her hand on Mrs. Richards' shoulder.

The slowness of age vanished from her an instant. The muscular atrophy that made it impossible for her to lift a single avocado was replaced with a speed that even the 25-year-old Kevin envied. The wrist of the offending hand was in her claw.

“Don't you know there are a million other parts of the store you could have gone through?! Why did you have to break past me? Don't you people have the slightest respect for someone's personal space? I know that back in my day we'd never see such rudeness. If you need to get through here, you can wait, just like the rest of them. Land sakes, can you believe something like that?”

She looked at Kevin then. “This little bitch tried to break past me!” Kevin was absolutely certain that she hadn't said bitch, but whatever syllable she had said packed the same weight.

No one ever challenged Mrs. Richards once she turned on them. She definitely wasn't a physical threat—at least, not directly. She was a very tiny woman; not short by any means, but of slightly below average height, pinched-in shoulders, an L-shaped droop-neck. Her blue shirt and jeans were calm and unthreatening. But her mental presence was so tremendous that it entered into the physical domain. It became something other—almost apart from her, but assuredly a part of her. Even the densest, most foolhardy customer just knew. Had they seen her before, and her hour-long checkouts? Had they seen and heard every critique she leveled against the staff? Or had they had a run-in with her, which had left them stunned to silence, even months or years after it happened? She seemed to leave people alone in the aisles, but she always knew when she was under observation. That was the worst part. To a certain degree, Kevin was sure she knew how the store viewed her, and that this was all a passive-aggressive act on her behalf. Perhaps even an attempt at redeeming the store, making them like her. Even if she was doing it wrong, that was the right thing to do—to make friends with your enemies. He couldn't really say she was his enemy, that he hated her, but the fear in his heart grew and grew, and worse than that, it became a gray mass that could freeze his blood if it came out. Eleanor, who talked a bit more about her own anxiety than Kevin liked, described the feeling as brain-vomit—cerebral nausea. She was definitely right, and that was exactly what it felt like. Nausea was the cold sickness-shiver at the base of your throat, and to feel it in your brain with no relief was something he'd become quite skilled at not dwelling on.

Now she was here, in front of him, and he got ready for what would be the next eighth of his shift.

It was sort of relaxing, in a way, having to deal with only one customer. The flow was what drove people nuts sometimes—all the new faces blurring on past. It was a little tough, though, when the slightest mistake could lead to cataclysm.

“Now, Kevin, I want a bagger, but I don't want him to start bagging until I get down there. Is that very clear?”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards. One moment, please.”

“I've got a very particular way of doing these things, you know.”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards.” He reached down to his phone. “Courtesy to Lane 8, please.”

“Must you guys do the intercom announcements? They're such noise. There's a bagger right there, Kevin, don't tell me you're too lazy to go down and fetch him.”

“My apologies, Mrs. Richards. It won't happen again.” He recalled when he'd left the aisle before, though, to “fetch” a bagger, and she'd immediately started asking him, with desperation in her voice, where he was going. He smiled, knowing that the tone she'd just used was her “teasing” voice. She almost never smiled so it was impossible to tell when she was kidding or not. She'd spent over two hours in the store once, her items still burdening the belt, because someone had thought she was kidding about something and snickered under their breath. Even after they'd sent that person home, Mrs. Richards had lingered as all the head cashiers tried to calm her down, her voice flickering between despair and rage: “Why did they laugh? Was it so funny? Was it so funny?”

“Can I start loading the belt now?”

“Absolutely!”

“But what about this Closed sign? Are you sure this belt is supposed to be open, Kevin...?”

“It's open for you, Mrs. Richards.”

“Alright. But if someone comes up behind me...”

“They won't, Mrs. Richards.”

She seemed to find that satisfactory. She began loading each item, one at a time. This was where the fun began—the essence of a Mrs. Richards transaction. Kevin rolled his eyes a bit when there was a WIC transaction where an item didn't ring up as WIC-applicable, and the cashier freaked out over having to go find the right item. In a Mrs. Richards transaction, the quest for replacement items could be a one-time affair, it could be a matter of starting her shopping all over again. He'd run himself ragged trying to find cans that weren't dented, boxes where the printing hadn't worn off in one small spot, fruit and vegetables that were completely immaculate, even the stems and leaves. She had explained to Tavvy once that she remembered all of the food scares from the '80s and '90s, where people were poisoning food or stealing it from the container. Or even just putting their hands on it and putting it back. Kevin had never met someone before who expected the cardboard box of a tuna can to be clean before now.

She also had to cross-reference all of her items against her list, and against each other. One time, she'd had to endure the horror of buying a single can of black pepper sardines that she hadn't noticed weren't the plain flavor and she'd had to eat it. Returns were not done; those were for people who needed to get money back. She had all the money she needed, and consequently she returned no items—and if she got the wrong thing it was the store's fault. It was Kevin's fault.

“Kevin!” she exclaimed then, once she'd gotten her first five of five hundred unpacked. “I-I have a tomato in my cart, b-but...I don't need a tomato, do I?”

“I'm not sure, Mrs. Richards. What does it say on your list?”

“I-it should say tomatoes, but I can't find them on the list...”

“Can I look?”

“Just don't damage it! Don't damage it! I remember once a cashier got it all crumpled up and I couldn't read it anymore...”

She passed him the list. “Oh, yep, there it is. One Roma tomato. You've got it!”

“But you're sure it's a Roma?”

“Yep. Romas are kind of oblongish, like this. Our hydro tomatoes are round with a blue sticker, and aside from that we just have the on-the-vine tomatoes and the golden tomatoes.”

“Golden tomatoes? What are those? Are they sweeter?”

“Uh, I'm not sure. I haven't tried one before.”

Her face twisted up. Ah, yes. She was one of those customers who was disgusted by cashiers who hadn't tried out all the store's product for themselves. If she went into a bookstore, she'd expect everyone there to have read every book she was interested in.

At first he thought she was going to have him go get a golden tomato. But instead, she just gave a skeptical look and went back to loading the belt.

Despite the false alarm, the real deal broke moments later. “Oh, no, Kevin!” she screamed. “Look!” She brought up a can of Spam, and at once he thought it odd that someone like her would be eating such proletarian food. But then, she had a husband, didn't she? It was “Mrs.” and not “Ms.” Richards. He probably ate this. Though he had a theory on old Mr. Richards—

“It's completely ruined!”

There was a scratch along the metal of the lid, that changed the common gold tint to a silvery one. It was almost imperceptible, and Kevin had to squint at it to see it. Her eyes were in shockingly good shape for someone in their 80s.

He knew there was no point resisting. “No problem, Mrs. Richards, I know right where it is. One moment and I'll get it for you!”

“But who's going to run the register?”

Oh dear. Now she was keeping him to the lane. And this was now the new norm; he sensed that at once.

“Who's going to run the register, Kevin?”

“How about I call grocery, Mrs. Richards? They'll be able to get it for us.”

And he picked up the phone again, calling, “Grocery, Line A, please—grocery, Line A.”

“There you go again!” she exclaimed, real rage coming into her face. “So noisy. Why can't you just have a signal you press to make grocery come over here?”

“That would a little complicated, don't you think, Mrs. Richards?” He was thankful grocery always took a while to answer the line, because she'd insist on talking during the call. But he already knew that was going to be a thing. “It would be a bit rough on our budget to install buttons for every department on every register, and to have mechanisms so each department could receive those signals.”

“Hello?” It was Will from grocery.

“Hi, Will, can you—”

“What I don't get,” Mrs. Richards shouted then, “is how I spend two hundred dollars here a week and you don't have 'the budget' to make this place better!”

“Yeah, it's not the best,” he said to her. “Will, can you—”

“You know, they have those sorts of buttons at Aldi. They have a lot of good stuff there, but the cashiers there were so rude to me. Can you believe it?”

“Not at all, Mrs. Richards,” he said. “Will, can you get—” And he finished out the sentence even as she kept talking. He was so focused on the call that he didn't notice she was leaning across.

“Are you not listening to me, Kevin?! This is serious!”

“My apologies, Mrs. Richards. Well, I have Will the grocery guy coming over with a new can of Spam.”

“You told him to make sure it's a good one? That's not broken or anything like that one?”

“Not specifically, but Will knows what he's doing.”

A certain tiredness seemed to enter into her eyes, and she did not reply. She went back to stacking her items on the belt. Twelve down, 488 left to go.

In a few moments (they'd gotten to item 20 at that point) Will came up with a can of Spam. He stretched his arm out so Mrs. Richards could see it. “Is this good, Mrs. Richards?” Will asked. Will knew all about her; he'd been working grocery as long as Kevin had been a head cashier. She took it from him and looked it over. Then she wordlessly handed it to Kevin.

“Is it good, Mrs. Richards?” Kevin asked.

“Yes!” she roared, as if she was confused by his question.

“Thank you, Will.”

Will nodded, knowing that no thanks would be coming from Mrs. Richards. He returned to stocking.

As soon as he was out of sight, Mrs. Richards pulled a green pepper out of her cart. Her eyes went wide. “Oh, no,” she said. The pepper slipped from her hands and landed on the floor. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh no...”

“What's wrong, Mrs. Richards?” He turned back to the bagger floating at the edge of the line, and nodded, urging him to go pick it up.

“I didn't want it before, and I don't want it now! It has mold on it!”

Now he looked over the pepper. There was one dark spot, but he brushed at it and saw it was probably a piece of dirt from the floor. “It looks fine to me, but we'll get you a new one.” He turned again to the bagger. “Can you take care of that?”

“No, no, no!” Mrs. Richards. “He needs to stay here and bag my groceries!”

“Well, he could go get it while I'm scanning everything...”

“No! He needs to be ready to bag! But don't start, young man! Don't you even think of starting till I get down there!”

“He knows, Mrs. Richards. All of our baggers know now not to start bagging you without supervision.”

“I don't know, I haven't seen him before. I sure hope he knows what he's doing, because I tell you, Kevin, I've had some bad experiences in the past.”

“I can imagine.”

She turned away, then, to head back to the cart. “You're sure he won't start until I'm down there?”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards.”

“And you'll let me know if he forgets and does start?”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards.”

Now, two lanes down, someone was looking back at the bagger they had. “Hey, Tim, you wanna help this lady out on 6?”

Mrs. Richards didn't hear that, and so Eleanor leaned forward and explained why that bagger couldn't move off of 8. Eleanor made mistakes but in moments like these she was a good kid. In the distance, Tavvy was getting a donut at the coffee shop. She kept scratching her face so that if Richards turned around, she couldn't see her.

“Well, what are you going to do about my pepper?”

“I'll have to call someone from produce. I'm sorry, Mrs. Richards, I know you don't like the noise, but I've got to do it.” She sighed as he said into the phone, “Produce, Line A, please.”

But then he blinked. Crap, that's right. There were three absences today: one cashier, one from grocery, one from produce. And they only had the one produce guy after Maggie quit. It was just one of the managers, Alex, covering that department for now. He turned back to see if they were helping a customer, and sure enough, they had a line.

“One moment, I just have to call grocery again.”

“Is this going to take long, Kevin? You are getting me my pepper, right?”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards. I—”

“Will here, Kevin.”

“Hi, Will. Can you bring us a green bell pepper, please?”

“There's no one in produce who can do it?”

“No, sorry.”

“Oh, don't worry about it! I'll be there in one sec.”

As he signed off, Kevin could see him sprinting across the front of the store towards produce at the east end. He smiled. That smile broke when Mrs. Richards said again, “Kevin?”

She held up a piece of meat—flank steak, it looked like. “I need another of these too.”

This one was legitimately damaged—the plastic had opened, and he suspected that she'd left a trail of blood behind her that she hadn't noticed. A quick glance down the aisles confirmed that. “I'll call meat,” he said.

“More noise? Ugh. Well, if you have to.”

“Meat department, Line A, please—meat department, Line A.”

But behind him, Alex over in produce picked up the produce phone, using his authority to dispel his own question-havers for a moment. “Calling meat, Kevin?”

“Yeah. Is there someone back there?”

“Al went on his break, and I don't think there's the usual there. Didn't someone tell you, we had a call-in for meat, too...”

“Great,” Kevin sighed, knowing that Richards was watching for any sign of frustration to arise, to inconvenience her. “Um, should I call grocery?”

“I have Will here. He's looking for a pepper, he says. Wanna talk to him?”

“I guess I could ask him to go to meat, too,” he said. “Let's do that. Can you tell him to bring a medium-sized flank steak, and to make sure there's nothing wrong with it? In our brand.”

“Sure, I'll get him on that.”

And he hung up.

“Well?”

“Will's gonna grab the steak, too.”

“Once he's got the pepper?”

“Yes.”

“You're sure.”

“Yes, Mrs. Richards.”

“Well, tell him to get me a new frozen pizza. This one's gone all floppy.”

Mrs. Richards, you see, had to—had to—shop west to east—left to right. So she started with her frozen items, most of the time, and so they were in bad shape after sitting in her cart for three hours.

“I'll have to call him again, if that's alright.”

“That's fine, but make sure you keep scanning those items!” she said, pointing to the two items left on the belt.

“Will, Line A, please.”

But Will didn't answer. Likely because he had his hands full. And there could be other customers stopping him to ask questions. But Tavvy came over, with a broad grin on her face.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“Can you get a replacement pizza for Mrs. Richards?”

“Absolutely!” she said. She was always nice around Mrs. Richards, again, because if you weren't perfectly kind—there would be consequences. Yelling for hours.

Because Tavvy was a head, she asked in advance: “Is there anything else you need, Mrs. Richards?”

“Yes, Tavvy, get me another box of wheat crackers. These ones sound a little rattley.”

“No problem!”

She shared eye contact with Kevin for less than a second, but together they thought as one: IT'S A PROBLEM.

As soon as Tavvy was gone, things seemed to reach a nice pace. She loaded as any other person would, and soon her cart was nearly empty. She always wanted Kevin to work slow but he knew the absolute maximum speed she'd allow, and so he'd always use that—except for sometimes when she wasn't looking and he'd treat himself with his normal routine. Once the cart was empty her surveillance began. She watched his every hand gesture, his every change of stance, and she kept an eye on the screen, too, with an assurance deep inside that something was going to ring up wrong. He didn't know why she was so nervous about that. He'd change the price to whatever she thought it was rather than call a department to verify. If they lost money on her, too bad. Maybe someday that'd convince management to finally ban her, as she'd been banned from literally every grocery store in a fifty-mile radius except this one.

“Listen, Kevin, I don't want that pomegranate anymore,” she said suddenly.

“Would you like a new one?”

“Yes, of course! Get that guy you called, Bill or whoever. Have him get a new one. And where is he with my meat and pepper?”

“He's evidently just making sure that he gets the right things, Mrs. Richards.”

“Well, have someone else get it!”

“There's no one else here, I'm afraid, except for the people in the deli.”

“Then, have them do it!”

“They can't leave their post.”

She blinked. “Why?!”

“Our deli is sort of like a restaurant, Mrs. Richards. You need to have waiters there to take people's orders.”

“They won't be missing much,” she grumbled. “The customer service here is miserable. When I say I want good products and fast service, I mean it. If McDonald's can get me a burger in a minute and a half, you should be able to get me a good and clean bell pepper in the same time. I don't think I've told you, Kevin, but I used to have a maid, you know, and she was quick as lightning. Kids back then really knew how to jump, didn't they, Kevin?” And suddenly, he was a fellow adult, exempt from her wrath—but young Tavvy, and teenaged Will, they were just lazy idiots. He was almost surprised she went for a low blow that standard. Ordinarily she was much more idiosyncratic.

“You know, I only come here because all the other stores said I was a bad customer, for pointing out how rude they were to me.” She spoke as if this was the first time Kevin was hearing this. It was the fourth. “And I spent the same there, two hundred a week or more! I wish I could get by with less, Kevin, but my husband needs me. He's so weak and helpless, that he needs me to do this for him. And if I'm not careful, you know, some of this stuff could kill him.”

“Right.”

“Of course, he could also quit his bellyaching.” He'd never heard that word pronounced so precisely before. “It's always pain this, and pain that. I tell him to take an Advil. That's what my mother always used to tell me.”

Kevin was starting to unspiral at the edges, but it was almost over. Here was Will now, and he could send him back out to get more stuff. In the meantime, however, he heard customers coming through other lines complain about the boxes and crates of product that were left out in the aisles. They were tripping over them, apparently, though the ones Kevin could see were large enough to be easily visible. Will needed to get back to his main job, especially because if he was still shelving at the end of his shift it would be his ass on the manager fire.

“Alright, Mrs. Richards, I think we're all ready. Comes to $238.41.”

This began the final phase, where she silently paced up and down the line, giving everything one last once over. These inspections usually went nowhere. She especially wanted to make sure he hadn't crushed anything by letting it go too far down the belt, but Kevin knew how to load a belt at this point when there was no courtesy—or if the courtesy was in handcuffs.

Then she started writing her check. Fearful of being judged illiterate, she took her time with each letter, making them as precise as possible. Often (but not today) she would get frustrated with her penmanship and scribble the whole thing out in meticulously and uncannily straight lines. Then she'd whip out a new check and start over. He didn't understand that, because checks cost money, but it wasn't his money or checks she was using. He already knew that she would tell him to run the check for manual deposit, rather than digitally, because digital checks were untrustworthy and she hated—hated—using the PINpad. Once upon a time, she'd had a credit card, but as time went on she started calling it a “filthy thing.” He suspected she'd also once used cash, but given how precise she was about the checks, there wasn't a doubt in his mind that she'd had to have exact change—and she'd need to triple-check it.

She triple- and quadruple-checked the paper before finally letting him have it. During this she kept urging, very quietly, “One sec,” and held her hands back out to take the check back from him. She looked up and down, forwards and backwards, squinting up close and gazing down from a distance. Then she'd hand it back to him, only to once more whisper, “Hold on, hold on, one sec.”

He ran it for manual deposit and the transaction was over.

Except it had only just begun. Now the bagging would start. There was once a time when he didn't need to co-supervise with her down at the end; but she had started putting less and less effort into explaining her directions, while still maintaining the same standards of quality, as if all the baggers she didn't recognize were briefed about her and already knew that the slightest error released the following:

“NO, NO, NO. WRONG—THAT'S ALL WRONG. DON'T YOU KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL, YOUNG MAN? KEVIN, THIS BOY IS INCOMPETENT AND HE IS A BAD BAGGER. RIGHT DOWN TO THE CORE HE'S A BAD BAGGER. HE SHOULD BE FIRED ON THE SPOT AND NEVER WORK AGAIN.”

And he'd tell her they don't do that anymore, and that people need to really screw up before they were fired. “This is why I'm anti-union! You didn't have this stuff back when there were no unions! It's just more trouble for the customer,” she declared. “Work conditions have improved so you don't need them anymore. You guys couldn't have handled the mean people we had back then, nor anything you had to put up with on the job!”

Maybe in Germany, when you were a little girl, and there was a guy with a square mustache in charge, Kevin thought. He instead said nothing and that was the only time he fought her. Silence was often a cashier's only weapon, and even someone like her couldn't decrease its value. As if it was a matter of that. Even if silence was an effective weapon against anybody, it wouldn't protect you if it brought someone into a beatdown-laying rage.

He didn't like all the baggers but he cared for the more competent ones—and only the best “got” to bag for Mrs. Richards. Still, her standards were getting more and more severe. Soon they'd be down to just one bagger who could help her without her flying into a rage and tearing everything out of the bag to put back on the belt.

Then Kevin passed the torch. “Would you like Tim to go with you out to your car, Mrs. Richards?” he asked.

“Yes, I will need that. Come on, let's go.”

“Have a good day, Mrs. Richards!”

“You too, Kevin! Thanks!”

And then the bagger would be out there for an hour—splintering the duty schedule to tiny pieces—making sure there was not a single mistake. If he dropped a bag too hard that entire bag was forfeit, and he would have to come back into the store to replace it, while she stood up there tapping her foot. Even five minutes would be an eternity for her to wait, and another long stretch of minutes would comprise her explaining that detail, from all angles, to the bagger, while everyone at the parking lot stared at them.

The sigh he let out was one of relief, however. His day could only get better from here.

#

It didn't get better from there, but he'd been planning on going to the bar anyway. He was meeting Nick there, to talk about the upcoming hockey season. As ever though they wanted to get work stuff off their chests. Nick had just been promoted to assistant manager at Home Depot, so he was also in retail.

“So there's this one lady we have at Sun Valley...” he'd began, and it took the time of Mrs. Richards' transaction to explain all of her ins and outs. Plus some theories. “I don't think her husband is even alive anymore,” he said. “I think she keeps his corpse in her house and that's why he sits around all day. That's why she's so hardcore about doing this for him—she hasn't accepted it yet.”

Nick had stayed entirely silent during this time, save for brief, quiet slurps of his ever-beloved virgin strawberry daiquiri.

“I hope I'm not being too mean to her,” Kevin said, looking down into his beer. “I mean, yeah, she causes trouble, but so does everyone else. And I know it's because she's got really bad OCD. I know how that feels, that's why they had me on meds for a bit when I was a kid. It didn't work, but I figured out it was an anxiety problem and so on top of the meds I got help. I figured out how to manage things. But—not everyone can do that. So I'm sure I'm being ableist.”

He looked up and past Nick. “Everyone in this world has their own problems. It's wrong to judge people for those problems if they can't or aren't ready to work on them. We should just be left to do our own thing, like the hippies said.”

“Well, first, uh, bullshit, because some people do need to be called out, even if they're mentally ill. It's just a matter of getting rid of your biases and letting those color how you see their actions,” Nick said. “Second. I've met this woman. She was in Home Depot today. She's a regular.”

“Huh! How's that for coincidence? So you're how many hours from pain and screaming now?”

“Eight.”

He blinked. He was tempted to repeat his description of her, in case it was someone else. Instead, he asked, “Does she sound like this? 'You've fucked it up completely, young man. I hope someone cuts your head off, young man, and stuffs it with garlic.'”

“That's spot-on. And I'm sure her name is Mina Richards, just like your person.” He laughed then. “It's kind of funny. My friend Marv over at Menard's says that she's a regular there, too. She always come in at midday every Saturday.”

“But you're sure she was at your store at 1 this afternoon?”

“From 1 to 5, yeah.”

“That's not possible. Because she was in my store for the same timeframe.”

Nick frowned. “Hang on, let me hit Marv up. He'll remember her—trust me.”

The two men's voices dropped to silence as they stared at Nick's phone, waiting for a text back.

Marv said, “haha yeah that old bitch was here today”

“Ask him when. Ask him when!” Kevin said.

“when?”

A pause.

“i dunno bro like 1ish? Late afternoon basically lol. Y?”

“That's not creepy or anything,” Nick said, laughing nervously. “It must be a mistake. A sister, maybe. Or—”

He stopped.

“What is it?” Kevin said.

“Look. Look over there, that CVS across the street.”

The drugstore windows extended along the whole front of the store, so you could see everything that happened in there. There was a long line leading up to the cashier, as people fresh off of work, same as Nick and Kevin, picked up odds and ends to cure the pain.

At the end of the line was Mrs. Richards.

It was unmistakably her. Kevin wasn't going to forget her face after having spent so much time with her today. He waited until it was her up at the desk, and he scanned her face to see if she was gonna start shouting. Sure enough, there she was—her mouth was stretched out too wide to properly get a lip-read. Kevin stood up.

“Watch my drink,” he said.

“Wait, no, don't go after her!” Nick yelled. But it was too late—and his daiquiri was too delicious.

By the time the lights had lined up for Kevin to cross the street, she was already gone. But he wasn't going to give up. He approached the cashier, who was about to head back to the shelves after having cleared out her customers. “Excuse me, miss?” he asked politely. “There was a lady here, in blue. An older woman. Very skinny. Did you see her?”

“Yeah, I just checked her out. What's up?”

“She's, uh, my mom's friend. Her name's Mina Richards, right?”

“I-I think so...” She stared at him suspicious.

“I recognize her out of an old family picture. My mom's been looking for her for years,” he lied.

“Well, tell your mom she can find her here. She sticks to routines—always shows up every Saturday. Her big order, actually, we already took care of, but she forgot something and had to come back...”

“When was that?”

“Oh, I dunno. Little after noon—actually probably closer to 1. She always takes her sweet time hanging around her...”

At once, Kevin wanted to text his own retail friends, to see if they, too, had experienced this phenomenon today. Or every Saturday.

Maybe he'd call in next week, and just cruise around to different stores around 1ish. He couldn't be right. At least he didn't want to be.

If he was right, then she was no ghost. She was something much more complicated—much bigger—and to Kevin, at least, much more terrifying.