I believe --
I believe -- that I've persuaded G to take a nap. That's been a big struggle for him and me and a significant source of the stress that's attended our days together. If his morning nap doesn't go well, it's likely the rest of the day won't either, and that's No Fun. He fights the sleep -- cries, rubs his eyes red. Uncle Dale's got some kind of voodoo that works every freaking time, but I'm the guy at the other end of the spectrum -- it just never seems to happen for us. However, in the time it's taken me to log on and write this much I haven't heard from him so maybe we're going to be okay.
Exhale.
So around 8:00 last night a Little Old Lady came to the desk with some paperwork in her hand, along with a bag of previously purchased merchandise. She oozed sweetness and her timing couldn't have been better. We're generally very, very busy at the desk from 6:00 or so until around, well, 8:00. People are off work and have had their dinners and they come in to take care of any of a million things. They check on their special orders, they make returns, they complain, they buy things, they put things on Will-Call, they ask to speak to a manager, they set up deliveries, they wonder why we don't have any air conditioners left. The line gets long and people get cranky. It's non-stop for a couple hours and to take care of everyone, whoever is at the desk has to stay sharp. Efficient, yet pleasant. Patient, yet decisive. Confident, yet understanding. It's a tough balance and it has the effect (on me, at least) of several espressos consumed on an empty stomach. I love it, but it makes me very Wound Up.
So just as the Crush abated last night, leaving me kind of numb and tingly with a buzzing in my ear, I look up from the desk like a running back who's broken a tackle and is looking for the next hit, and there's Edith K. alone, smiling at me. I smile back and, recognizing that there's no line behind her, breathe before I ask, "What can I do for you?" It's in the breathing -- in the moment of awareness between the conditioned, unthinking smile and the verbal engagement -- that I realize who this woman is. Not that I've ever met her before, or even heard her name, which she hasn't given me yet, but I know this person. Better said, I know those wrinkles -- they're the deep creases of an old woman who has spent years in the country, laughing and crying as appropriate. And I know those hands -- bony and thin and no longer strong, but toughened by a lifetime of hard work and softened by loving on generations of babies. I know that wedding band -- worn smooth by the decades. I know that flannel and I know those eyes and I'm glad she's come at 8:00 when I can give her the time she deserves rather than feeding her through the grinder.
Across the counter those hands shuffle a receipt and a credit card statement, then the bag. I do returns all night long and ten minutes earlier I'd have snatched up the receipt and the bag and my scan-gun and had her refund processed faster than you can say retail-is-soulless-but-it-pays-my-mortgage, but instead I listened as she drew a breath and looked me in the eyes and told me her Story. The purchase she's come to return was her husbands; on August 10 he bought the parts to repair an extension cord (people of my generation don't repair extension cords, we replace them) and a garden hose. "I cut through the cord," she tells me sheepishly. He, "Robert," bought his replacement parts, to the tune of eleven bucks and some change, on the tenth, which was a Wednesday, (I looked it up,) but for whatever reason, he'd put the projects off. Apparently procrastination knows no generational distinctions. We didn't talk long enough for me to discover whether Robert was a chronic procrastinator of if this was out of character, but at any rate, he died on the 19th (a Friday) before he got the jobs done.
Fixing stuff was his job, not hers, and she had no need of those parts anymore. All she needed from me was the refund processed, which would put her husband's credit card balance back to zero, and the account closed -- easy.
For me.
"I'm sorry to hear that," I say as she tells me that Robert's gone, and it sounds lame coming out of my mouth -- she doesn't seem to notice. "Had he been ill?" None of my business, but she seems to want more than just a refund.
"No," she says, "I found him dead in his chair," and her eyes are smiling and crying at the same time -- no tears, but such depth.
His chair -- such personal space, such an intimate detail. I mumble something about how terrible that had to be (I'm in way over my head by now) and she calls me honey (I knew she was country) and says, "There's not a better way to go; he didn't suffer," and I realize that her thin, veiney hand is on mine there on the counter. In the midst of tying up the loose ends of what she would later tell me was a 58-year marriage she's taking the time to comfort the Big Dummy at the Home Depot.
I can't imagine losing someone after so long together.
"He was eighty-five years old," she says. "He was a good man." And the simplicity and depth of her statement and the way she made it reminds me of something someone told me once about the way that farm people handle death. That because they're so in-tune with the earth and her cycles, they're not as devastated by death when it's time. They know it's the Way Things Are. And that theory has never sounded more plausible.
We get the refund taken care of -- I could do it in my sleep -- and it's time to call Credit Services and get the account closed. Now, I don't know how many operators there are on the job at any given time, but I do know that I call there about a dozen times a day and I've never gotten the same person on the line twice. Until last night. By the time Edith arrived at 8:00, I had talked to Mary Jane at Credit Services twice. As you can imagine these are generally not long conversations, but by the end of the second one, I knew that Mary Jane didn't like the Yankees, or baseball for that matter, very much, but that she did like football --the Colts in particular, and Peyton Manning especially. I attributed the Peyton Manning thing to their mutual southern roots -- Mary Jane had a full-blown southern accent going on.
So by the time Mary Jane answered my call for a third time last night, we were kind of friends. I tell her the business end of the story, put Edith on the line for the requisite questions and we get it taken care of. When Edith gives me the phone back I ask Mary Jane if she can hang on the line for just a minute and she says that she can (her shift is ending in half an hour -- we've been counting it down all night -- and she's more than willing to kill some time on the phone). I thank Edith for coming in and she reciprocates. Somehow, in the time it takes to conduct a transaction, we've become People to one another. She squeezes my hand one more time.
Mary Jane says, "She was so sweet."
"I know," I tell her as I watch Edith make her way out the door, "They were married for
58 years."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not -- she found him dead in his chair." And we wonder together how long Edith will live on without him.
"58 years," Mary Jane repeats, and I hear her inhale sharply-- a sniffle. "I'm from the South, honey," she says. "You're breaking my heart."
"I'm sayin'," I tell her and we both know that it means, "I'm feeling what you're feeling -- we're actual People together, you and I, even if just for the duration of this phone call."
"I gotta go," I tell her, "Have a good evening."
"You too darlin' -- G'night."
And I think about the fact that Ruthie and I will celebrate 10 years in December, which I keep telling people feels like a Pretty Good Start. I think about the seven-month-old at home, and what he'll become in the time it takes us to be married for 58-years. About all the pain and joy and Life that awaits us. And then somehow, I'm thinking about this anonymous
Waiter whom so many of us read and of whom I am so often tempted to be so jealous. As best as I can tell, he's alone -- waits tables at night, and then comes home and writes. Writes well. Writes in peace and quiet. Writes goods stuff. Like I wish I could. But what I'm remembering specifically, with Mary Jane's sniffling still lingering in my ear and my mind's eye still seeing Edith K. and her dignified grief exiting Home Depot 3822, what I'm remembering as my next customer (and at the moment I hate that word) approaches the desk, is that the talented Waiter
wants what I have. And I don't know if that's irony, but it's helpful.
It's 8:30 now and I have another customer. I look up. Smile. Inhale.
"What can I do for you?"
