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Chapter One

Sandy stands at the cash register waiting for Jimmy to finish pumping gas. She knows he will come in and ask for two packs of Marlboro Lights, make some off-color comment, look her up and down, smile his creepy grin, and wink as he leaves, calling, “See you later, Babe.” So she gets the cigarettes ready and is glad for customers getting coffee and picking out food from the grill. She doesn’t need to be nice to him for very long if there’s a line.

Harry is standing at the rack of novelties near the door; trinkets such as lighters that look like fishing poles, key chains with toy turtles, and some stuffed animals on the lower shelves where kids can see them and grab them with slushie-coated hands and the parents will have to pay. Harry reads the headlines in the paper while sipping his coffee which he rests on top of the stack of Gatorade cases, and when it gets crowded, as it does every morning around seven, he carries his coffee and paper to the counter, places down exactly two dollars and eight cents (never in her hand, few people are polite enough to actually hand her the change, she thinks), says, “Thank you Sandy,” and walks out to talk to the younger watermen in the parking lot gathered around Billy Ray’s truck backed up to the pile of bags of logs for sale. It’s like this every morning. If it rains, they sit on the logs under the overhang.

“See you tomorrow, Harry,” Sandy calls back to eighty-something Harry, and is sorry he leaves before sixty-year-old Jimmy comes in since Harry usually engages the creep long enough to distract him so that by the time he turns his attention back to Sandy’s twenty-five-year old body, she’s waiting on other customers.

Jimmy enters and gets to the counter just before another customer, Patty, with her coffee and a small bag of donuts, as usual. Sandy puts the cigarette packs in front of him and rings them up. “Anything else, Jimmy?”

“Oh darling!” he says, a slight sound of drunk in his slur, but it’s just his way. He turns to Patty, “Look at how my girl knows me! No darling, just the cigs today.” He pays and starts to talk when Sandy looks toward Patty, who places her donut bag on the counter in front of Jimmy. “See you later, Babe,” he says and leaves, a chill running down Sandy’s spine.

Every damn day.  

Tracy the manager mingles with the customers near the cooler getting their cases of Corona and Bud Light and only once in a while some dark beer worth the money, with her small iPad strapped to her neck like a server’s tray at the old fifties style roller skating drive-in restaurants. She scans sandwiches and bagged pickles and some small cakes. The chips and soft drinks and alcohol are counted when the men who carried those cases in and out deliver them, like the chip guy, Gus, who rolls in six or seven cases of varieties of bagged potato chips in familiar and disgusting flavors. He leans on the boxes waiting for Tracy or Sandy or anyone willing to take a few minutes away from the constant line of customers at the counter so they can count the delivery and he can be on his way. “I’m leaving in three minutes” he might mutter sometimes, but, really, no he’s not. It just makes him sound more in control instead being forced to wait for the old woman at the register holding a twenty-dollar bill who seems to gain gratification by standing over the lottery tickets for far too long, saying, “Sandy, I’ll take a number three. How much is that? Oh, no, no. Maybe instead a number twenty-five. None? Oh okay, well let me see then…” and a line forms, so Sandy will say, “I’ll be right back,” and she counts Gus’s bags, sends him on his way, opens the other register and gets others on their way, sips her Red Bull and moves back to the old woman who still hasn’t landed on a number she likes. Eventually, the woman says, “Oh just give me the number three anyway. I came in for that so I should know what it costs!” and everyone in line lets out a sigh of disgust.

It is eight-thirty am. It should slow a bit now, briefly.

The last customer to check out for now is Casey. A “true gentleman” Sandy always says, both to him and to her coworkers who have a penchant for making fun of every single person who enters the store. “He always buys the same damn thing,” one will say of whoever just left. Or, “He never buys the same thing twice.” “He is such a smoker!” “What an alcoholic!” “Dear God! I wish he’d shower! He smells like fish all the friggin time!” and on and on. Sandy stays silent, most of the time, except for the more than occasional exhales of exasperation when dealing with guys, and the occasional woman, hitting on her.

But there are some, like Casey, who make it worthwhile. He’s always polite and always has a compliment. Today it was, “My Sandy, you really have beautiful eyes, and today they seem more alive. Enjoy your day!” and she smiles. Casey isn’t that old, fifties perhaps, still too old for Sandy. But there’s something about him that makes anyone who hears him know he isn’t trying to pick her up. He is just a nice guy. There are others, too, both men and women, a scattering of fine customers who like it when she works and make it known to Tracy. Part of it is how sharp she is and how she can clearly correct a problem almost instantly, and part of it is her pleasant disposition and even-temper despite those problems and despite the jerks.

There are moments when their rudeness gets the best of her. She might ring something up twice by accident, or, worse, tell someone they are out of something the customer is determined to have, and, of course, it is Sandy’s fault and they’ll let her know what a crappy human she is. Once, when she came in to work late, Brenda, a co-worker, though usually on a different shift, asked if everything was okay at home, knowing it almost always isn’t since Sandy’s boyfriend, Tim, usually rags on her each morning. Sandy said, “Yeah, sure, Tim let me know how lucky we are now that we must wear masks since my face looks gross in the morning. I cried for twenty minutes.”

“Geez,” Brenda said, “you can get that abuse here!” and walked out to head home after her shift, but when it slowed down and Sandy stood sipping her second Red Bull and watched a woman fumble with the gas pump, she thought, No, no. At least here, Casey comes in, or some of the other guys who always say how nice I look. Or that lawyer who comes in sometimes and tells me this job is fine, but I have it in me to do so much more. And even Jimmy, the pig, clearly thinks I’m attractive. There’s some good here, some chance to feel good about myself. Not at home. Luckily, she is usually too busy to think about it since her sharpness and friendliness placed her right on the busiest parts of the day. No, she likes it here. She is needed and appreciated here and it gives her a sense of purpose, which, at twenty-five, can be gratifying, but, as Sandy is beginning to figure out, can be a death sentence. For now, though, she enjoys her job.  

Until Ben comes in at noon for his shift, the POS as he’s referenced when he is not in the store. Not because Ben isn’t nice—he calls all the men “Brother” and all the women “Ma’am,” no matter the age—something left over from his military service and subsequent jail time, his early release for good behavior, and his subsequent non-violated probation. But he is known in the convenience-employee crowd both here and at several stores up and down this stretch of highway as the Piece of Shit because, as Brenda likes to point out, “No one, anywhere, ever, knows more than this prick.” How to do inventory, how to check people out faster, how to pick the best lottery tickets (“you really have to watch the news to see what’s going on and find the equivalent reference in the cards”), how to lose weight, how to talk to your boyfriend at home when he is constantly putting you down, or in the case of Brenda, how to raise three boys properly since he raised a teenage girl for at least a couple of the years he was around. He knows it all. What’s more, they will point out, it doesn’t matter how correct one of the employees is about any given subject; he absolutely must outdo. If Brenda tells a customer that the beef and cheese tacos on the grill are fresh, Ben needs to let the customer know not only the same, “Yes, Ma’am, they are absolutely fresh, freshest we’ve had in a while,” but he has to add his imagined contribution to that: “I was just telling Brenda we need to make sure we only serve the freshest ones so she went ahead and made them for me just now,” even though that never happened and he has less seniority than anyone else in the store save Old Peg who comes for four hours every day to make coffee and clean the counters, and has been there since it was a “Dave’s Stop and Go,” back in the sixties when there was nowhere else in town to get anything to eat except the IGA.

Sandy, to the point, does not like working with Ben. It isn’t the work—Ben is efficient and can be left alone to do most anything, and, she likes say, at least he can count, unlike many who have spun through this job. No, she doesn’t look forward to shifts that overlap Ben’s because he both gives her a headache and makes way too many personal comments to her, especially about Tim. Tim may be an asshole, she thinks, but he’s my asshole. 

Other than that, they all get along well. Ben has to be there because no one else will hire him, and this is walking distance to his home, albeit a long walk, and he doesn’t drive. He is there because he accepts his fate that this will pay the bills and he has learned to live on what me makes. Brenda is terribly smarter than the job, smarter than this life she’s living with overdue rent and three kids who constantly need things, one of whom is special needs, but she knows that, and has, to her credit most people say, taken it on one hundred percent. She will be manager someday and is already assistant, which means she makes a bit more money than she used to, and is given more responsibilities, like access to the larger bill section of the safe, the ability to check in deliveries and make orders, and even the ability to hire if they need help. Tracy is there because she started there in high school, worked her way up, proved to be efficient, honest, and desperately even-keeled in any situation, and never had ambitions to do more, though managing a corporate convenience store is demanding enough—she loves running the store, gets paid well, and even won Manager of the Year at the annual corporate convention in Orlando, which came with it a generous financial reward. She treats the other workers like offspring, and she is still young enough at fifty to work for many more years. Her and Brenda make a great team.

Then there’s Sandy who simply shouldn’t be there, knows she shouldn’t be there, everyone else except Tim knows she shouldn’t be there, but like so many twenty-somethings in the last twenty-something years, had trouble emotionally moving much past high school, just eight miles away. She has always lived in the small town, knows everyone and everyone knows her, has been with her boyfriend forever, and is respected and appreciated by Brenda, Tracy, and everyone that comes in, and a position like that in a small town on a peninsula far from any city doesn’t always happen. God knows what it might be like down in Richmond or up in DC, she thinks. No, this works. “Someday” is her mantra. Someday. “If Tracy cared about her,” one regular, a lawyer who works over in Richmond, said one day to Harry at the Gatorade cases, “she’d fire Sandy and force her to move on, find her potential.” But Harry has observed far too much for far too long, and since the lawyer has only been in the area for fifteen years, he’s still a come-lately and doesn’t know better. But Harry does, and told him plainly, “Tracy isn’t the problem. Not even Tim’s the problem. Sandy’s the problem.” They both nodded at that cold truth.

Sandy glances at the clock to note her shift ends soon, so she offers to help Tracy do inventory after work for some overtime. Tracy says okay, not because she needs the help or because Sandy is that ambitious, though both of those things are true, but because Tracy understands Sandy simply doesn’t want to go home.

At the coffee counter, Peg wipes down a spill and complains about how messy everyone is these days and it wasn’t like this even during the sixties, and she starts ranting about how much more courteous customers used to be, and an afternoon is dedicated to this subject. Every day it is a different rant—sometimes the way people are dressed or not dressed, sometimes the cursing so common in convenience store lines, and sometimes about how the shelves are left in disarray. Her voice grows louder to outdo the rattling of the drink machines, and Sandy regrets her offer to stay noting a headache coming on. Ben comes over to explain to Peg how to better clean the counter, but Peg, the woman in her eighties who just a few days earlier complained about the cursing, tells Ben to shut the fuck up, and Tracy and Sandy laugh so hard they lean on each other, and suddenly Sandy knows that is exactly why she stayed; the laughter she doesn’t have at home. It takes her mind off of her pointless relationship. But, damnit, she thinks. It’s hard to get motivated when everyone’s fine with where they are now! The watermen are content. The old men and women who come in for coffee and lottery tickets are all content. Her co-workers, her boyfriend, hell, even Jimmy is content. She sees this and knows being surrounded by so many satisfied people is going to destroy her. She needs to quit. For now, though, she counts egg salad sandwiches.