by Raymond Brunell
Leah placed the plastic divider after the cereal boxes. The customer’s hand followed, setting down milk, bread, and chicken thighs in foam and cellophane. Tuesday afternoon, register three, the fluorescents making everyone look sick.
She scanned the cereal. The beep felt wrong in her wrist.
For a second she could taste her own mouth at seventeen, kissing Jake Mendoza behind the gym, his braces cutting her lip. Not a memory she’d thought about in years. Not one she particularly wanted.
The milk. Another beep. Jake’s basement, the way the carpet smelled like a dog.
She looked at the customer—forty-something, khakis, wedding ring catching the light. He wasn’t looking at her. Nobody ever looked at her.
Bread. Chicken. The plastic divider bumped against her scanner, and Leah moved it aside. Her hands were shaking.
“Twenty-three fifty,” she said.
He tapped his card without meeting her eyes.
David set the divider down carefully. The cashier was young, in her twenties maybe, with dark hair pulled back. Her name tag said LEAH. She moved like she was underwater.
The beep of the scanner went through him strangely.
He was in his apartment three months ago, Rebecca’s suitcase by the door. I can’t do this anymore, she’d said, and he’d stood there, couldn’t make his mouth work. The angle of the hallway light. The specific hollow in his chest.
Another beep. Rebecca’s face when he asked her to stay, the way she looked at him like he had already disappeared.
He blinked. The cashier—Leah—was staring at the milk carton like she’d never seen one before.
“Sir?” Her voice was unsteady. “Your total is twenty-three fifty.”
His hand moved to his wallet, but he was somewhere else. Still in that apartment. Still hollow.
Thursday. Register three again. Different customers, same fluorescents. Leah arranged her register supplies twice before her shift started. Pens. Receipt tape. The stack of plastic dividers, smooth and inert.
The first customer: a woman in yoga pants. Leah scanned the yogurt and felt the woman’s hangover from the inside, that throb behind the eyes. The bananas gave her someone else’s child’s birthday party, balloon animals, and forced smiling.
By lunch break, her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Marissa covered her register while Leah sat in the break room. She’d been sitting for four minutes. The clock said twenty-three. The fluorescents hummed. She pressed her palms against the table, trying to ground herself in something solid. The formica was cool and real. She could feel the texture of it, the slight give where the laminate had started to separate at the edge. But the hangover throb was still behind her eyes, the birthday-party forced-smile ache still in her jaw. Someone else’s exhaustion layered over her own until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. The microwave beeped—someone’s lunch—and she flinched at the sound.
The weekend was impossible. Every transaction was someone else’s divorce, job loss, cancer scare, good news she’d never share. She started wearing two layers of gloves—the store-issued ones and latex underneath. It didn’t help. She tried to keep her hands in fists, touching the items as little as possible.
She needed this job. Rent was three days late already. She needed this job and couldn’t do this job, and those were the same facts.
On Monday, she used four plastic dividers for one customer’s groceries. Five for the next. She knew it was crazy. She did it anyway. As if the plastic could insulate, could create dead zones between items.
The customer gave her a look. Leah kept scanning
##
David came back on Tuesday. He told himself he was out of coffee. The store had bad coffee at good prices. Logical.
Except he had coffee. Half a bag in the cabinet, the good kind Rebecca had liked, was still there three months after she’d left. He’d stood in his kitchen that morning looking at it. He considered making a cup. Couldn’t. The grocery-store coffee was terrible, but it was new, untouched by memory. That’s what he told himself in the car. That’s what he told himself, pulling into the lot, finding a space, walking through the automatic doors even though his chest was tight and his hands were starting to sweat.
Register three. The same cashier.
He set down the coffee, the frozen dinners that were cheaper than cooking for one. The plastic divider went between someone else’s order and his. Leah’s hands flinched when she picked it up to move it aside.
The first beep: he was in the store but also in a college dorm room, not his room, someone else’s laughter through thin walls. The quality of loneliness at nineteen. Not his loneliness. Hers.
He should leave. He picked up his wallet and felt the weight of her student loans, the number that never got smaller.
“Are you okay?” The question came out before he could stop it.
Leah looked at him. Really looked, for the first time. “I don’t know.”
The chicken thighs scanned, and he tasted her mother’s disappointment, metallic and familiar. He gripped the edge of the conveyor belt.
“The scanner,” Leah said. Her voice was barely there. “Do you feel—”
“Yes.” His own voice sounded distant. “Every time.”
They stared at each other. The line was backing up behind him. Someone coughed, annoyed.
“I can’t quit,” Leah said. “I need—”
“I know.” He did know. He’d felt the number on her bank account, how rent and insurance and groceries were a calculation that never worked out. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
He didn’t have an answer. He took his bags and left, and in the parking lot, he couldn’t remember driving here. He couldn’t remember deciding to come back.
##
Leah called in sick Wednesday. She stayed in bed. She could still feel it—the accumulated weight of other people’s lives pressing against the inside of her skull. Her phone said 2 PM, but it could have been anytime. The light through the blinds didn’t change. She thought about getting up, making tea, and eating something. Thought about Wednesdays in general, the way they felt like nothing, suspended between better days. Her hands were empty, but she could still feel the texture of items moving across the scanner, that moment of contact before the beep. She pulled the blanket over her head. It didn’t help.
Thursday, she was back. They’d docked her pay for the sick day. Register three, fluorescents, the same beep.
She saw him in line before he saw her. David—she knew his name now, had felt him sign it on forms, his hand cramping around the pen. He had a basket this time. Less groceries. He’d rationed it out, she thought. Made himself wait.
He set down the plastic divider. His hand was shaking.
Leah scanned the bread and she was in his car, driving to this store, palms sweating, the pitch of his heartbeat when he’d pulled into the parking lot. She scanned the milk and felt his relief at seeing her here, seeing her name tag, that small confirmation: Leah.
She looked up.
David was gripping the counter. His knuckles were white. “I shouldn’t have come back,” he said.
“But you did.”
“So did you.”
The line shuffled behind him. The store’s music played something optimistic and generic. Leah moved the divider and set it aside with the others. Her stack was running low. Corporate sent them in boxes of five hundred.
“Twenty-one seventy,” she said.
David paid. Their fingers didn’t touch. They were careful about that now, deliberate in their distances. He took his bags.
“See you next week,” Leah said. Not a question.
“Yeah.” He met her eyes. “Yeah, probably.”
He walked toward the exit. Leah turned to the next customer, the next set of items crossing the red line of the scanner. The fluorescents hummed. The register beeped. Her hands found the plastic divider, smooth and useless, and set it down.