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Getting Ready

Amy Locke

    James shivered in the cereal aisle. He couldn’t understand why it was so cold here, far from the freezer section of the grocery store, and on a balmy April day. He put his hands in the pockets of his dark jacket and studied the boxes before him. Big-headed cartoons grinned manically behind bowls of cereal, flanked by swirls of marshmallows and milk as thick as glue. This was unfamiliar territory. He wanted to go to his end of the aisle and pick up a box of bran flakes. Lily could stand to eat something for breakfast that didn’t resemble a pile of candy. And he would let her sprinkle a little sugar on top, he supposed, maybe a few banana slices. Then again, he thought with a grunt, he didn’t want to deal with Brenda if he were to set Lily off into a tantrum over a bowl of “Grandpa cereal.” When it came to his daughter, it was easiest to just do things her way. And that was simple enough, when he was the one visiting her. But this weekend Brenda, her husband Jack, and little Lily had decided to spend Easter at his home.
    “You’re getting too old to make the drive, Dad,” Brenda had insisted on the phone. James didn’t bother contesting the point, which he thought was probably true, if a little insulting. It had been a long time since he had entertained guests, though, and he wasn’t sure what was expected of him. The idea of disappointing Brenda and her family had him squirming over the smallest details. He wanted his typically bare kitchen to be stocked with just the right cereals and snacks for Lily, but the pressure was already making him feel uneasy—the wall of circus colored boxes in front of him seemed to be growing. Giving up, he grabbed something fruity and something chocolaty and moved on.
    A wheel on his shopping cart was too loose. Combined with the shuffle of his loafers, its rattling created a muted but grating cacophony. He couldn’t concentrate. The mental shopping list he’d pieced together was fuzzy. Paper towels, carrots, graham crackers. What else? He was drawn to a pyramid of diapers displayed at the end of an aisle. Diapers? He tentatively reached out for a package, trying to remember when children stop wearing diapers, trying to remember Lily’s age. A dusty memory broke into his thoughts—he was changing Lily, bald and bawling and so tiny, with Brenda wearily coaching him from a rocking chair. Or was that Brenda squawking on the changing table and his Ruby in the rocking chair? Ruby. She would’ve remembered the list—she would’ve written it down. She always knew what was best. James let out a wheezy sigh and put the diapers in his cart, just in case. His arm ached, at the inside of his elbow, right where Ruby had liked to set her thin hand, with fingers slightly curled.
    “I don’t want to do this without you,” he said, as if she could hear him. His head was filled with images of his home—the dingy carpets and curtain-less windows, the seldom-used kitchen; his wife’s shoes all lined up in the guest room closet, harboring dust and wispy cobwebs. Brenda had grown up in that house but the thought of her there now, with her own healthy blossoming family, seemed absurd. With Ruby gone, it was a solitary place—a cocoon, a tomb.
    “What if . . .” he said. He heard his voice, gravelly and damp with phlegm, like it was pushing through a wall of wet sand, and he felt a hundred years old. “What if,” he said again, not knowing how to finish the sentence. He looked around for a bench, wishing he could sit down. There was one near the restrooms in the back corner so he turned that way. Clipping the nearby display with a wheel of his shopping cart, half a dozen packages of diapers fell to the floor. He frowned. When had he turned into this bumbling, befuddled old man? He had been himself this morning, hadn’t he? He stared down at the diapers, as if he might find the answer spelled out on the lavender packaging. A few shoppers had stopped to watch him. Heat crawled up his neck and unfurled in his ears and weathered cheeks. Arthritis had too firm a grip on his lower back to let him bend down and pick up after himself so he murmured “I’m sorry,” to no one in particular, and walked away.
    The bench was made of cold, slick metal—uncomfortable, but its sturdiness was reassuring to James. He sat down, putting one hand on each knee, and thought again of his wife. Picturing her sweet face was the surest way to chase off a bad mood. But today, he could hardly bring up the image. With shaking hands, he pulled his wallet out of his trouser pocket. He stared down at the brown leather, soft and well-worn from years of use, and a strange, swift surge of dread went through him. It quivered in his gut, so tangible, like something sharp trying to break out of him. He took a gulping breath and the feeling passed. He opened the wallet. The familiar photograph was tucked behind clear plastic. Seeing it soothed him like a cool hand on his forehead. It was an old picture, showing Ruby’s red hair as yet untouched by gray. He had surprised her with the camera, capturing her mouth half open, eyes brightened with laughter as they often were. She had loved to laugh, to tease, to coax smiles from him. He ran his thumb across the plastic, wishing he could return to this moment from some distant summer. They had been on a family vacation, or a Sunday afternoon picnic. James wasn’t sure. But he remembered that dress well—black gauzy material that floated like morning fog around her, covered in tiny red dots, with a matching red belt on her trim waist. The straps of it had left her freckled shoulders exposed. It had been five years since he last kissed those freckles.
    “What’s the matter, gramps?” A biting voice pulled him from his reverie. He looked up to see two shaggy-haired boys nearby. They were young, perhaps thirteen, all squared shoulders and jutting jaws, full of the shuddery bravado of boys too eager to become men. Only now did he realize he was crying. He pocketed his wallet with one hand, swiping at his tears with the other.
    “Yeah, what’s wrong?” said the one who hadn’t spoken first. “You piss your pants?”
    “Forget your diaper this morning?” the other added. “Don’t think those are your size,” he said, peering into James’ shopping cart. They elbowed each other back and forth.
    The pair looked arrogant and uneasy at the same time—proud to get away with such disrespectfulness, but also prepared to run and feign innocence if needed. James’ eyes bulged. It had been some time since he last felt so compelled to cuff someone. He stood, arm lifted to shake a finger in their smug faces. But before he could show them he knew just as many sharp words as they did, and likely more, the boys paled.
    “Dude,” one of them said, his tone now high and panicky. “What’s wrong with you?”
    “Shut up,” the other urged. “Let’s just go.” They turned and rushed down the nearest aisle.
    “Nothing’s wrong with me,” James grumbled as he watched them leave. “Little punks.” He was the only one now in this back corner of the store. He looked around. The carefully arranged end of aisle displays and keenly polished floors were sad, he thought, with no people milling about them.
    “All this food, just waiting to rot,” he said, looking over the varied items. There were bunches of bananas, canned pears, cheap wine, soda crackers. One display was of several dozen boxes of macaroni and cheese, stacked under a sign reading “Canned Ravioli—$0.75 per can!” He stared at it, shaking his head. The misprint agitated him so much that he went over and swiped at one of the boxes with the back of his hand. The whole display toppled like a set of painstakingly arranged dominoes.
    “Whoops-a-daisy,” James said, waving his arms with stage-like flamboyance. “Made another little mess. Well, can’t blame a relic like me, can you? I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m old!”
    He looked around defiantly, daring any employees to come and reprimand him. But only one shopper, a young woman in a gray jogging suit, crept into view. She wove her cart out from one aisle and into another, giving James a short glance. He sighed, a little deflated that his outburst wasn’t even worth a shelf stocker coming over to shush him.
    He went back to the bench and sat down, unsure of what to do with himself. A headache had been pulsing at his temples all morning and the pain was starting to spread, reaching down to his stomach and out to every limb. The cart at his side was an unpleasant reminder of the task at hand—a task he couldn’t bring himself to complete. At the moment, he wanted more than anything to be in his bed—resting, meeting Ruby in his dreams, and not worrying about how he was supposed to entertain Brenda and her family without cable television.
    Perhaps he should cancel. He could go home, call Brenda, and tell her not to come. He was sick. The house was infested with cockroaches. He would work out some lie to convince her. She would be upset, and make him feel guilty, but that was nothing new. It would be better, in the long run—Brenda wouldn’t have to be disappointed in James’ shortcomings as a host. He loved his daughter, of course, but he didn’t want to see the look on her face when she came into his house; didn’t want to know what words she would use to criticize him, to make him feel old and useless, to make him feel Ruby’s absence sharper than ever. And he wouldn’t miss Jack droning on about his job with poorly feigned modesty, telling stale stories and asking the same trivial questions, as if James wasn’t lucid enough to remember them from the last family gathering. But it did hurt him to know he wouldn’t feel Lily’s fierce little hugs, her arms linked tight around his neck, or receive her whispered secrets and stories, always infused with giggles, or hear her singing to herself. Ruby used to sing to herself, too—some song remembered from childhood or a wordless tune hummed low. He missed that sound more than anything.
    James was standing in line now, with three people in front of him. He was in the express lane but the cashier was moving slowly. The steady beeping of items ringing up made him think of a heart monitor. He started to sweat. The woman in front of him was perusing the magazine rack, her back turned to her shopping cart. Her child, a little boy, sat in the front section beside her purse and he held its leather strap tightly in his small, plump hands. He had wide brown eyes, very much like Ruby’s—dark and silky with a tinge of red, like chestnuts or cherry wood. Those were Ruby’s eyes, and Brenda’s, too.
    “Are Lily’s brown?” he wondered aloud. He wished he knew—it felt so important.
    “Lilies are white,” the little boy said. He swung his feet.
    “Not always,” the woman said without turning around. “It depends on the type, Jeffrey. Remember the pink ones?”
    “I wasn’t talking about the flower,” James said.
    “My mommy has a flower shop. Where do you work?”
    “Nowhere,” James said. “I’m retired.”
    “Old people retire. My grandpa is retired. He sits on the couch all day. What do you do all day?”
    “Nothing,” James said, and it felt like the truth. Day after day, he sat in his recliner, he reread the same books, he watched the local news; he stared out the window of his two bedroom home and envied the neighbors walking by, and the birds and the trees, because they seemed so sure and purposeful, so glad to be alive. Gladness was foreign to James. He didn’t feel it when he received impersonal Christmas cards and obligatory catch-up phone calls from the few friends he had still living. He didn’t feel it when Brenda begrudgingly invited him to holiday dinners only to criticize his every comment, or simply ignore him. He felt something very close to gladness, though, when Lily scrambled onto his lap and asked for a story, reaching up to rub the stubble on his chin, her eyes full of contentment. He could nearly see them; nearly make out the color of them.
    He was beginning to feel very ill. If only the cashier would hurry up so he could buy these . . . . He looked down to see what he had clamped in one hand. It was a small box. “Light bulbs?” He didn’t need light bulbs. He didn’t remember picking them up. “Where the hell did these come from?”
    “Hell,” the little boy giggled.
    “Excuse me,” the woman said. She stuffed a magazine back into place, rumpling its cover, and turned around. Angry creases framed her mouth and settled between her eyebrows that had been plucked to the thinness of guitar strings. “Did you just swear at my child? Did you just swear at my four-year-old child?”
    James didn’t understand what she was saying. His world was going smudgy, as if life was nothing more than a charcoal sketch—all its shades and certainties being blurred into nonsense by someone’s careless hand, by this frowning woman and her brown-eyed child.
    “Did you bring me these light bulbs?” he asked her, shaking the box. “Did you put these in my hand?” He swayed, trying not to fall into her—her angular elbows would surely go through him like shards of glass if he did.
    “No,” the woman shouted. “I didn’t put anything in your hand.” She leaned around the customer in front of her to glare at the cashier, waving her hands in the air. “Can you do something? This man is deranged.”
    “I’m deranged? You’re the one hollering.”
    “Can’t you make him leave?”
    “I’m not allowed to touch anyone,” the cashier replied. He sized up James for a moment. “He seems harmless. Just confused, I think. He’s old.” He went back to ringing up items.
    “Then call a manager over, at least. He’s making me very uncomfortable.”
    The cashier shrugged and picked up a phone beside the register. James was vaguely aware that everyone within earshot was staring at him.
    “You remind me of my daughter,” he said to the woman.
    “Just go away,” she said. Her face was very pink. “Please.”
    He did want to go away. Wherever away was, it was sure to be better than this smothering limbo. He didn’t remember getting in line, or walking through the store, or how he got to the store. He didn’t know how he ended up here, penned in by these young hateful strangers and the register beeping like a metronome, demanding that he keep time with this world—keep breathing, keep living, though his heart had surely stopped five years ago.
    “I’ve been trying to leave,” he said, his voice hoarse and alien to his ears. “I don’t want to be here with you. I don’t like you, any of you. I just want to go home.” His eyes were going dark at the edges, filling with the same blackness that was hanging heavy in that closet full of left behind shoes.
    “Exit’s that way,” the woman said. She moved aside to let him pass but James’ legs were quivering on the quicksand floor. Even two steps were unmanageable; he staggered, lurching into her. She grunted in disgust, shrugging him away.
    “Are you drunk?”
    “Mommy, blood,” the little boy said. James and the woman looked at the smear of it on her forearm.
    “Sir, you can’t take those without paying,” the cashier said.
    James was still holding the light bulbs. He clutched the box to his chest like a talisman, with arms raised just enough for everyone to see the side of his jacket, wet with blood, and the thick black handle.
    “Is that a knife?” someone said. “He has a knife!”
    “No, he’s been stabbed,” said another gray faced stranger.
    “Me?” James said, and he smiled because it seemed so silly. He didn’t remember the man who approached him in the parking lot with desperate, hateful eyes. He didn’t remember how he refused to give up his wallet, or how the man said “you think I won’t kill you?” with spittle gathering at the corners of his cracked lips. And the moment when the man pushed the steel blade into his torso and left it there was lost to James, cocooned in some corner of his brain where its cold grasp couldn’t reach him.
    “What’s the matter with all of you?” he said to the crowd that had gathered around him. They were all speaking at once, pointing, pulling out cell phones, clutching their children. James started to feel afraid. Someone took him by the elbow and pulled him out of the checkout lane, into the wide aisle. The box of light bulbs slipped out of his hands and was crushed under someone’s feet.
    “What happened?” someone said close to his ear.
    “I don’t know.” He grabbed a fistful of the person’s shirt and shook it. “I don’t know, damn it. I don’t know how I got here.”
    “You didn’t see who did it?”
    “Did what?”
    “He’s in some kind of psychological shock. Has anyone called an ambulance?”“Should we take the knife out?”
    “No, no one touch it. It’s probably been keeping him alive—slowing the bleeding.”
    “What?” James said. He could feel the shirt bunched in his hand still. It felt like flannel, but couldn’t see the person wearing it. All around him, he could only see uneven smears of dim colors, as if he were looking into a broken kaleidoscope. Trying to bring the world into focus was exhausting so he closed his eyes.
    There was something expansive and cold beneath him, hard against his shoulder blades; something soft and lumpy was shoved under his head. He was on the floor.
    “I’m sorry I called you deranged.” He recognized the angry woman’s voice, close-by and quiet and trembling.
    “That’s all right,” James murmured. His anxiety was dissolving, leaving a nebulous sense of well-being. He smiled. “Maybe not so much like my daughter. She never apologizes.”
    “The ambulance is coming. You’ll be at the hospital soon.”
    “That so? Not for long, I hope. My family is coming for Easter. Ruby would want them to come. I want to be ready for them. Fussy Brenda and boring Jack and sweet little Lily. Lily. She’s so much like my Ruby.”
    “Shush now. They’re almost here.”
    “You know, I’ve just remembered it.”
    “What?”
    “Lily’s eyes. They’re green, like mine.” He was so relieved that he could see them. “Green. I’d show you, but I don’t want to open them.” The space above him was growing heavy and encroaching onto his chest, tamping him down against the floor. He sighed. “I don’t feel quite right.”
    “I know. Do you mind if I hold your hand?”
     “Maybe the little boy.”
    “You mean Jeffrey?”
    “Yes. A soft little hand would be nice.”
    “Come here, Jeffrey. It’s all right.”
    The little boy came and put his tender skinned hand in James’ leathery one and squeezed, and though James couldn’t quite make his thick calloused fingers fold shut over those small fingers, he could feel the warmth of them. For a moment it seemed he could feel it running all through him, and then he felt nothing at all.

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