Daily Rescue #5

July 25

A man with a sun-reddened face and gelled hair comes in around 10am.

"It's been a long time since I've seen you here."

He leans over the display case, rests his forearms on its plastic top.

I don't recognize him. But the feeling is familiar: a man seeing me without my seeing them.

"Yeah, I've been away. Back part-time."

It’s my second week back on the job. I spent a semester teaching, but teaching is just as complicated as writing, and I can't sustain both at once.

I've missed the simple, full-bodied work of this place —the bending, the lifting, the bagging, and thanking. When the hours slow and I get bored, I start doing it all—the, bagging, the wrapping, the lifting, the pouring—with my left hand instead of my right. Suddenly, what I know too well feels strange; suddenly, I feel new.

"So how about the country white? Have that?" He asks.

There are three loaves piled against the bread wall behind me. Two are flat against the parchment, serving as the base; the third is propped diagonally against the first two, like a surfboard against logs.

This man, if he were to have looked up, would have seen them—their sesame-laced tops, their pillowy Beluga-whale foreheads where the air gets stuck in the oven.

It is clear what breads remain, and what kind. But I sense he wants me to do this work too: The seeing. The saying.

"Give me all of them,” He says.

"All of them?" I ask. I heard him the first time. But I want to hear him say it again. Or maybe I want the people standing behind him (the mother with the stroller, the boys in the soccer cleats, the young woman hugging a Kristin Hannah novel) to hear.

“Yup—Why not.”

He keeps on like this for several minutes, naming individual items, asking me how many we have, then closing with, "All of them."

After the country white it’s the berry bars. Then the sourdough chocolate chip cookies—the house favorite. Then the raspberry scones.

When I'm lifting the last tower of cookies into the box, I look up at the line and check their faces for a prayer: Please leave two. Okay, just one. But no one says anything. It's almost like they knew this would happen; like everyone but I knew this man, and his hunger, was on his way.

I tape his pastry boxes shut. My coworker has been moving around me, to my right and left, trying to grab what's left for the people next in line. She is ushering these customers around the man's tall frame—like sheep around a lion, like water around a boulder—to ring up their smaller orders:

A warm quiche.

An avocado toast and a chai.

I've shimmied each of his six loaves into paper bags, and lined them up next to the boxes. The entire counter is covered--full --of what he wants. What he took.

The shelf behind me is bare.

"I'm gonna need those in plastic. I'm driving out of town," he says.

The wrapping station, where the metal-toothed roll of plastic wrap lives, is in the back, out of his sight.

Alone, I try to imagine what he's doing, where and to whom he's taking this many cookies, this many scones, this many bread loaves. A party? Hungry grandchildren? Twenty of them?

But when I picture him, I can see only a giant room—like Shrek's swamp before Fiona, before Donkey, before love broke in—with the breads laid out around him; berry bars bleeding onto the floor, their brown sugar and walnut tops crumbling. Scones like knives, their corners dulling inside a drawer.

The serrated teeth are dull, so after I pull the plastic taut around each loaf, I need to slam my forearms down, hard, across the stubborn shine until it breaks, under the weight of my body. Each time, my arm hits the metal table too hard, and makes a loud thud.

I look back at the register, where the man is waiting now, to pay; where he will leave a 20% tip and wish me a good day.

When I meet him at the register, I do not ask him his story.

This is, a part of me knows, the one thing I can withhold from him: My interest. My curiosity. The questions that turn shapes into people; that even turn a man's taking, what looks like his greed, into a story about giving, sharing.

The only question I am ready to give him before he goes is, "Do you need a bag?" But I stop myself.

Of course he does. Of course.