She Just Isn't There

            Were her fingers faster than any others? I think so. She looked up and over, around and down her glasses as she pushed the keys down. The old, non-computerized keys, the ones you had to arch your fingers, bend your knuckles to shove down. She was a million years old and she could do it better than seven year old me. She even got me a footstool and let me ring up a six pack of Tab for my mom. I was baby slow, little kid slow. The keys had a good, solid click as they went down and then snapped back up. A dollar fifty for Tab. Mom would give me two dollars, and expect change back, and would count the change from hand to hand before stuffing it into her big black purse. I wasn't much for counting, but my clerk friend helped me with the change, then I was on my way back.

When I used my whole lower arm, fingers, wrist and elbow, to ring up the pop, she laughed, but a nice, wasn't-that-fun, laugh. She held my hand with her big fingers while I jumped to the tile (which made a noise, so I hopped to make the smack again, it was not as loud though).

And my shoes. I was not a master of knots. Knots you can untie in anything short of an hour. The shoelace mystified me. She helped. When I came in for my mom's daily errand (Tab, Winston 100's) she got in the habit of checking my shoes, my knots, and fixing the mess I left there. Her hands could fix anything; they could even smooth the curls and waves on the back of my head, sticking up in a blond/brown riot. She would hold her hand there and talk gentle and hushed. About nothing, really. I leaned into her hand and nodded and smiled, I didn't have to talk much, I smiled, which made her smile, and her face would fold in on itself, and I would smile bigger.

She put my mom's stuff in a big paper bag for me, then folded and creased it down, asking me if I was sure I could carry such a big sack.

Sure I could. I could carry anything 7-11 could put in a sack.

I think of the quiet, the still, like the world on mute. The air in the store, you had to push against, swim through. Strangers were there, strangers who looked at my mother's cigarette note (Please sell my son a pack of cigarettes, Thank you, Mary Lou Stewart.), then at me, like I was John Dillinger, forging notes in a middle aged woman's liquid cursive to supply my Winston 100's filter habit. They didn't know me, I didn't know them. We were strangers over cigarettes.  They wore loafers. They couldn't help with knots.

Kids at school asked me several times if I heard the shots. I lived behind the store, I should have heard something. I had, but I didn't really.

"Yeah, three shots. They got like 200.00 dollars or something. Man! You missed it..." 

She was very nice. I'm glad I didn't hear anything. It would be like I was part of it. I wasn't. I didn't hear, didn't see, and the strangers didn't know, didn't say.

I wondered what it felt like, the shots. The death. In play war, I'd fallen, riddled with invisible bullets, many, many times. I'd lie in the dirt and twist back and forth, then lie still. Until I figured out an excuse to get back in the game. I could rise from the dead, rejoin the game as my own twin brother, or say I was just faking, to fool the bad guys. Did she want back in the game? She couldn't get up and be her sister, Some bad guys can't be fooled.

When her glasses hit the tile, did she think that her mom would kill her for breaking them?

I would have. I wouldn't have gone back home, mom would have been really mad. I wish I could have been there, to hold the back of her head, make her feel okay.

She would show me how to loop and cinch the laces, her auburn hair gray at the roots. She smelled like old flowers and Aquanet, and faded blue eyes peered through her glasses.

No, I didn't hear the shots, never saw blood, never asked the new people about her. What would they say, what would I say. She was here then. she's just not there anymore.

I still look for her sometimes. She lives in the corner of my eye, just out of head turn.

My shoes still need tying.