He said, Mom. My son. Forty-one years old, who has been in Colorado since 2019 according to every phone call I’ve had with him, and who has apparently been living eleven miles from my house since the previous September. The cashier was standing right there. She’d known for two months and had been carrying it around and had finally tried to solve it in the only way available to a twenty-five-year-old on a register, which was to keep the two of us on different days.
She’s his girlfriend. She’d recognized me from a photograph in his apartment — she said she knew my coat before she knew my face. She’d asked him a hundred times to call me and he wouldn’t, and she wasn’t going to do it for him, so she’d tried to buy him time and had bought him about nine days.
He came out to the car with me. What he told me over the next two hours in a grocery store parking lot was that he lost the job in 2019 and never told me, and then there was a year I’m not going to write down here, and then eighteen months of getting straight, and by the time he had something to report he’d been lying for so long that the lie was the thing he couldn’t get past. He said he’d driven past my house maybe thirty times. He said he’d sat at the end of my street in November on my birthday.
He’s been to dinner nine times since March. He fixed the gutter without being asked, which is how I know it’s really him. Her name is Kayleigh and she has been to dinner eight of those nine times and I have never once let her pay for anything. I still shop on Wednesdays. She still works Wednesdays. She rings me through and doesn’t say much, and last week she just said he’s good this week while she scanned the bread, and that was the whole conversation.
