Recap: Bonnie tells Hope that Mrs. Bowers is not her mother. Hope isn’t sure what to think about that. Diana, the unfriendly older daughter, walks Hope to the Five and Dime store where she’ll be working.
Kathy was an older woman with thin, wispy, white hair and a pointy nose. She stared at me with cold, dark eyes.
“You’re the help they sent?”
I nodded.
“You don’t look old enough to run a register.”
I agreed, but there was nothing I could do about it.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Come over here. I’ll show you how it works. You know how to add?”
I was the math whiz in my class, but I wasn’t going to share that information with this mean woman.
“Answer your elders, girl.”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
“All right. Now this is the way you work it. You punch in the numbers and when you’re done, a bell rings when you open the drawer. You have to make the change.” She shook her head as she pulled out a worn-looking, brown shoulder bag purse that was missing a strap. She put it over her shoulder and stepped towards the door. “Remember to be polite to our customers, and if you don’t know where things are, tell them to go ask Patricia in the back. She knows the whole stock.”
I was glad there would be someone else here with me, a grown-up. Of course, I wouldn’t know where anything was. I just got here this minute.
Kathy left and there I was, standing by the register, feeling very small and very young.
A little boy and his teenage sister strode into the store.
“Mama says you can buy one toy.” She approached me and asked, “Where are the toys?”
I stepped away from the register and went to find the correct aisle, although I knew that I had to return to the register quickly. They followed me. In my short walk, I memorized the main items on each aisle and their numbers. I could picture them in my head. It was a special gift my mother said to be able to do that. Father gave it a name, photographic memory. It made learning things in school very easy for me. Sometimes it would make school a bit tedious if the teacher was going over something and I’d already taken a picture in my head and knew the material.
When the brother and sister came to the register with their purchases, I rang them up and gave them their change.
Patricia waddled over to congratulate me on my first successful use of the register. “You’ll do just fine here,” she said, “just try not to leave the register when you’re the only one in the front.” She was a short, wide woman with a kind face. “You need any help, honey, just call me. I’ll be in the back, reorganizing the whole sock section.”
“Thank you.” It felt good to be met with kindness.
A few minutes later, a black boy wearing a small skullcap, who must have been around six years old, stepped into the store. “Can you tell me where’s the soap?” he asked. “My Mama asked me to buy dish soap.”
I pointed to the correct aisle, and he skipped towards it.
Just then, two men swaggered into the store. They smelled like alcohol. Something about them shot fear through me. “Where’s the Coke?” the man who was bald and wore steel-rimmed glasses, asked me.
I pointed to the glass refrigerator case that was a few feet from the register. “Git us them Cokes and a carton of cigarettes. Git ’em for us now!”
The man’s beady eyes were jeering. I didn’t want to walk anywhere near them, but I quickly walked to the refrigerator and took out three bottles.
“We want six,” the man snapped.
My hands were trembling. I placed three on the counter by the register and went back to take three more.
The bald man turned to the other man who had a mustache and a scar on his cheek. “Jud called. Says he found that white Caddie?”
The other man whistled. “Where?”
“It was off the highway. They musta left it and switched to some other car. We gotta find them. He’s gettin’ impatient on us.” The man spat on the ground.
White Caddie. My heart started pounding. Were these the men chasing us? I swallowed. What if they recognized me? I wanted to run out of the store, but I realized that this would just make them suspicious. I tried to slow my heart and breathe. The bald man was standing by the refrigerator, a few feet from me. He started cursing as he touched all the soda bottles in the refrigerator. The other man complained. “This dinky place don’t have nothin’ decent.”
I was holding my breath. Please leave, please leave, I prayed over and over. Don’t look at me.
“Ya know, my hunter instincts are never wrong. I feel we’re on the trail. We’re really, really close. Hey, that girl could be in this store.”
“Y’all crazy.”
My heart was jumping into my throat. I wanted to duck under the counter, but that would draw their attention to me. I willed myself to keep busy putting money into the register. I couldn’t even see the bills. My eyes were blurred with terror.
The hunter man turned towards me. Just then, the boy appeared with a bottle of dish soap.
The bald man stuck his foot out and the boy tripped. “You serve that kind here?” He pointed at the boy. “Why you let him in here, girl? Where we come from, that kind got their own store.”
The little boy’s knee was bleeding, and the dish soap was leaking all over the floor. I stepped down to help the boy, but one of the men blocked my way.
The boy was crying. I wanted to call the police. These men were wicked men.
There was a phone near the register. I reached for it but one of the men grabbed my wrist. “You hang that up, Missy.” The men were laughing. They headed towards the door with the Cokes and the cigarettes. “We’ll pay some other time,” the man with the mustache chortled. They left laughing an evil, snorting laugh. The door banged behind them.
“Are you okay?” I bent down to help the little boy up. He was shaking with sobs. I’ll get you a Band-Aid and some tissues.
Patricia brought me a box of Band-Aids and a roll of paper towels. Together we mopped up the mess. The boy said, “I broke the soap.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “Those mean men did. We’ll get you another soap.” The boy pulled a dollar from his pocket, and I gave him change. Patricia took a lollipop from the jar on the counter and handed it to him. “I don’t have money for that, Miss.”
“It’s a present from me,” she said. She handed me a dime to put in the register.
The boy touched his head. “I lost my yarmulke.”
“What?” I asked.
“His skullcap,” Patricia explained.
We both looked around on the floor. I spotted it in a corner. It was sopping wet with soap. I handed it to him.
He stuck it on his head and left holding a bag with the dish soap in one hand and grasping the stick of the cherry lollipop he was sucking in his other hand.
“Thank you!” he said between licks.
I turned to Patricia. “Do those men come here a lot?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“Never saw them before. What a mean bunch they were. I saw their license plate outside. It said South Carolina.”
My scalp tingled with icy fear. They must have been the men chasing us. They’d mentioned a white Cadillac.
To be continued…
Susie Garber is the author of the newly released historical fiction novel, Flight of the Doves (Menucha Publishers, 2023), Please Be Polite (Menucha Publishers, 2022), A Bridge in Time (Menucha Publishers, 2021), Secrets in Disguise (Menucha Publishers, 2020), Denver Dreams, a novel (Jerusalem Publications, 2009), Memorable Characters…Magnificent Stories (Scholastic, 2002), Befriend (Menucha Publishers, 2013), The Road Less Traveled (Feldheim, 2015), fiction serials and features in Binah Magazine and Binyan Magazine, and “Moon Song” in Binyan (2021-2022).
