4:39
She lifts her big toe from its imprint in the foam sole of her flip-flop, presses it back down. She watches the woman at the register swipe her third card, or her fourth. The raised seam of the milk gallon handle is burrowing into her fingers. The woman at the register asks the cashier to remove a few items. It stings. She shifts the gallon to her other hand.
The man in front of her is wearing a camouflage hat, bill turned backwards. His shirt plunges down the sides. His shoulders are rosy with a splatter of freckles. The mass of his back pushes into the thickness of his arms. His Carhartt pants have a hole in the pocket he keeps his wallet in. She wonders how much longer it would take for the hole to open up large enough for the wallet to fall out, or be taken. His boots are scruffy, like they’ve seen a decade's worth of winters. She can’t see his face but she knows, with all her being—call it a homegrown instinct—that he has a full, sun-bleached, goatee.
Everything about him that she can and cannot see is slightly upsetting. The slouch of his pants despite the belt through belt loops, his stocky fingers, the black line of filth under his nails, the angle of his hat, the cut seam of the tank curling outward, the pink of his mid-body against the slight bronze of his arms. Could there have been a moment in her life, a derailment, a consequence, that could have remade her into the kind of woman that found men like this attractive? Men that work hard labor sixty hours a week and still manage to have no true muscle definition. Men that think hunting and fishing are sports. Men whose trucks and trailers have the lingering, tangy aroma of unemptied ashtrays. Men who think it’s acceptable to belch in public and edgy to use slurs.
How much of a divergence, and at what point would her life stream have drifted her towards being this man’s wife? She had friends that married men like this. She attended and witnessed those misfortunes. How did she manage to escape the same affliction? These men are not rare. They are a far reaching breed, found in every crevice of the country. How did she manage to circumvent the fate in front of her? She shudders. To even think of waking up next to the stench of a man like that. The moldy towel scent of their body odor. What would the version of herself look like under the umbrella of loving a man like that? For a moment, she is soft. Who is the her that could have been, under any other circumstances? She lifts her toe again, shifts the milk once more, waits as that man takes out cash and counts coins for a pack of Marlboros.
When she brings the milk and cereal and Band-Aids to the car and tells her husband she needs to check the liquor store he’s going to ask why. And she’s going to have to explain that she wanted more options than the grocery store had. And he’s going to ask if the store really didn’t have enough options. And she’s going to wonder why the fuck he can’t just say OK, why he always has to question her. Why can’t he just say OK? And she’ll assure him the store did not have enough options. She will explain to him that she wanted to spend a little extra money on a nice bottle of wine for them tonight because they deserve it. And then he’ll say OK.
And she’ll storm off, across the parking lot, to the liquor store. Flip-flops slapping her heels as her head gets warmer and she makes and releases fists. Nails digging into her palms. She’ll regret wanting wine at all, which will cascade into a catalog of regrets. Then, without putting in the effort and care she saved for selecting, she’ll grab the first expensive bottle she sees and pay for it without making eye contact with the person ringing her up for fear that meeting a stranger’s eyes might cause the tears swelling to drop onto the counter. As she walks back to the car she’ll wonder if she truly avoided marrying a man like the one still counting coins for cigarettes. In every way physical, yes.
If she dropped the milk, right now, and it hit the linoleum floor with a thud, and it's purple lid popped off, and the milk surged out with quick gasps of air, who would notice? If she let the Lucky Charms and the Band-Aids drop in the shallow flood of milk and she walked through the Employees Only entrance and out the receiving dock and kept walking, who would notice? If she walked until the imprints of her big toes, and second toes, and all her toes, wore down, until all her toes touched the earth or cement or asphalt, would anyone notice?
“Six nineteen,” the clerk says. She puts her card in the reader and watches as the young woman places the milk in one bag and pulls it away from the other bags and puts it into a second bag and she wonders if a bag was even necessary in the first place. She grabs her bags and receipt and heads towards the exit. If she left the bags in the entryway, who would say anything? If she exited out the door farthest from her car would anyone know she was exiting through the wrong door? If she walked, and walked, and walked, would anyone notice?
