Dallas Noble

A Chance Encounter

It was a hot July night after his senior year of high school, and Eddie Macmillan was bored as hell.  He was working the night shift at the Walmart in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, one of those cities that grows horizontally, built by companies whose massive stores were the size of toppled skyscrapers, surrounded by nothing but farmland and highway and defunct factories for miles in every direction, except for the few decrepit clusters of houses that nestled in their shadows like parasites on the back of some huge whale.

The glow of summer had faded weeks ago and now Eddie was just floating, suspended in his own life like one of the millions of water droplets in the humid air.  It seemed like the whole world had sunken into a stupor fitting for the heat.   Eddie didn’t have anywhere he needed to go, nor did he have anywhere he particularly wanted to go.  But by the time the woman walked in that night, he had spent almost twelve hours in the Walmart, working two shifts, and he knew he didn’t want to be there anymore.

It was 10:38pm, according to the digital clock on Eddie’s cash register screen, when she appeared framed between the sliding glass doors at the front of the store.  She was the fourth customer Eddie had seen that hour, and she was walking fast, almost running, leaning forward as if pulling against some great force.  She came to an abrupt stop next to the customer bathrooms, pulled out a pack of Camels and a lighter, and moved to light one up.

“Ma’am,” Eddie called, hurrying over, grateful for the chance to leave his stifling corner of the register.  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you can’t smoke in here.” 

From close up, he could see that she was about to cry.  Her breath came in little gasps; a few tear streaks had already cut white lines into her cheeks.  As Eddie approached, she dropped the lighter into her purse and began to stuff the Camels away with shaking hands.

“Sorry,” she said.  “Sorry.  My bad.”

She was young--barely in her twenties, probably, not much older than him.  Although the night was sweltering, she wore a thin cardigan with sleeves that drooped over her fingers, flip flops, and cutoff jean shorts.  She had flat brown hair, and her belly pushed large and round and taut against her grey tank top.

Eddie stared dumbly at this for a few seconds.  He didn’t know why it so transfixed him.  Maybe it was just surprising.  “You’re pregnant,” he said.

The woman stopped fiddling with the Camels abruptly and looked up at him. “Um…yeah,” she said.

“Isn’t smoking...bad for babies?”

The woman shrugged, regarding him with a mixture of confusion, wariness, and something else--anger, maybe, or reproach.  The glint of someone ready to defend herself or run.  Her shoulders were shoved up and forward as if trying to push the rest of her body away from him.

Eddie suddenly realized that he had been gawking and snapped his mouth shut, blushing.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “That was a stupid thing to say.”

“‘S’okay,” said the woman.  She looked down.  Her mouth moved as if she was still speaking, but Eddie couldn’t make out any words.  He thought he might have heard a whisper, almost seeming to come from somewhere behind her head.  It sounded like, “Kid’s fucked anyway.”

“...Coffee.”  The woman’s voice shook Eddie out of a stupor.  “He sent me in to buy coffee.  Can you tell me where to find it?”

“Oh, uh, that way.”  Eddie pointed behind him and to the left.  “Aisle 13.” 

“Thanks,” said the woman.  Eddie stared as she shuffled away, then realized he was staring and looked at the floor. 

When the woman came back ten minutes later, Eddie was picking at his fingernails and reading the magazine covers at the next register for the fourteenth time that day.  At almost 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night, there weren’t many people at the Walmart.  A few geriatric employees worked one out of every three registers behind him.  Eddie had thought that, for some reason, she might avoid him, but now here she was, setting down a can of Folger’s coffee.

Glad to have something to do other than read magazine covers, Eddie made a mental list of her purchases as he scanned them: three cans of Folger’s coffee.  Two boxes of coffee filters.  A bottle of ibuprofen.  Concealer.

“How are you tonight?” he asked her, in the polite but detached way that cashiers are supposed to ask customers how their days are.

“Okay,” she said in a small voice.  “Yourself?”

Eddie decided to forget about protocol.  “About to fall asleep, honestly.”

That earned him a laugh.  Her laugh was so wispy it was see-through.  But it was there.  “I guess it gets pretty boring here.”

“Yeah.  No kidding.”  A pause.  Beep, went Eddie’s scanner.  “What do you do for work?  Is it boring there too?”

“Oh, I don’t really do much.  Just stay at home. Once my--my daughter’s born, I guess….”

“But what do you do now?”

“Nothing.  I do nothing.”

Eddie nodded.  “I get that.”  Beep.  “But even when you’re doing nothing, you’re doing something.”

The woman looked down.  “I just don’t get out of the house much.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

Eddie looked up.  Something in the tone of her voice made him do it.  The tears that had cut white lines into her cheeks earlier had also washed clean the skin beneath her eyes, revealing it to be mottled with blue-green bruises.  They were pale, mostly healed, but there were new ones too, reddish purple welts standing out where the makeup had washed away but blending into her foundation at the edges. 

He knew what this was.  He had seen it enough times before.  He remembered seeing his mother in the bathroom when he was ten, washing off what he knew of her face, revealing a new one of swollen reds and greens and blues and yellows. 

Looking down again, trying to keep his tone casual, Eddie asked, “How’d you get those?”

“Get what?”

“Your cheeks.” 

“Oh, um, I--” the woman stammered.  She wasn’t used to making things up.  Not yet.  Not like the others he’d known.  “I just fell.  On the stairs.”

Eddie nodded.  “Pretty nasty fall.”

“Yeah, it was.” 

Eddie finished scanning.  “Seventeen twenty-three,” he told her.

The woman payed with two ratty ten-dollar bills.  Eddie opened the register, took out two dollar bills, two quarters, two dimes, a nickel, and two pennies.  If she didn’t want to talk about it, he couldn’t make her.  He hadn’t expected anything otherwise.  You had to be careful with these things.

“Oh, and could I also have a pack of cigarettes?” said the woman.  “Camels, please.” 

Eddie turned and reached for the cigarettes on the shelf behind him.  “You over eighteen?”

“That should be obvious.”

“Yeah.  But I had to ask.”  Turning back, Eddie went to give her the pack of Camels, the woman extended her hand to accept them, and there, in the middle of her palm, were three fresh, smoldering cigarette burns.  Eddie froze.

Realizing what she had done, she retracted her burnt hand in horror and snatched the change from him with her other hand.  But she too seemed to have no idea what to do next, and she just stood there, staring at the floor, lower lip trembling.

As Eddie looked at her, standing there in her cutoffs with her lips trembling and her hand clenched into a fist around her cigarette burns, he was seized by a strange compulsion.  He cleared his throat to chase away the silence.

“Have you ever thought about going to Pittsburgh?” he asked.

“Pittsburgh?” the woman echoed.

“Or upstate New York.  Maybe even Canada.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Canada—haven’t you?”

“I guess.  I don’t know.”  The woman shrugged.  She looked at Eddie with new suspicion, drawing her gaze further back into her skull.

“It’s just, it’s not like I have any reason to stay here,” Eddie continued.  His hands fiddled with the box of cigarettes of their own accord, turning it over and over and over and over.  “I have a car.”

“I don’t know you.”

“But if you did. Would you want to?”

The woman shook her head sharply, three times, as if trying to shake away the thoughts that were lodging there like spiderwebs.  She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.  “I don’t--”

“You haven’t ever thought about it?”

The woman opened her eyes again and in them, pale and watery, Eddie saw her answer.  He nodded once, slowly.  Neither of them broke eye contact.

“There are ways,” said Eddie.  “I wouldn’t have to stay.  But I could, I could...I could help.  If you wanted.  I only make minimum wage here, but I’ve been saving--”

“He would find me.”

“I could protect you.”

She shook her head, quick and scared, like a rabbit. “You don’t know him. He’s--”

“There are ways. I’ve seen how it works. There are ways for you to be safe.”

“But the baby--”

“What other option does she have?  What other option do you have?”

“...”

“...”

“The only one.”  Suddenly, like shutters slammed closed over a window, the woman’s eyes were hard and guarded again.  “I shouldn’t stay too long.  He’s waiting outside for me.”  She started to collect her items, sweeping them into a plastic bag.  In his distraction, Eddie had forgotten to bag them.  Hurriedly, he reached over to help her, fumbling with the box of cigarettes he had been turning over as he dropped it into the bag.

“I didn’t pay for those yet.”

“Take them.”

The woman flinched in protest but said nothing. She stared fiercely down at the grey vinyl of the conveyor belt the whole time.  “Thanks,” she said, and it sounded like no more and no less than if she had been thanking him for the Folger’s.

“Our pleasure. Have a good night,” said Eddie.  The same worn reply they were taught to give all customers.

He felt cut and dried again.  Flattened and pressed out and thrown on a shelf.  The rush of emotion from earlier receded suddenly, leaving him confused and unsteady and numb.  As the woman turned to leave, the unexpected glint of her wedding band in the fluorescent lights caught Eddie’s eye.  “Hey,” he blurted.  “Um, take care of yourself.”

The woman’s eyes flickered up to his for one last, quick glance before fixing themselves back to the floor.  “You too.”

He watched the sliding doors part for her and the darkness outside swallow her in silence.  If there was one thing Eddie Macmillan knew, it was when to give up.

When his shift was over, Eddie lingered by the cash registers longer than he normally would, lost in thought.  He felt strangely as if he had failed at something.  He also felt like someone other than himself.  He had never been the sort of person to act on impulse, or even the sort of person who had impulses.  But tonight, something--maybe the same thing that had driven him to speak to the woman earlier--told him to grab a pack of Camels from the shelf and go outside, and so he did.  He stuffed two dollars into the cash register and walked to the smoking area outside the employee entrance.

The night was heavy with the promise of rain.  Eddie hadn’t brought a rain jacket.  He dug through his backpack in the dark, looking for the lighter that he kept mostly for friends.  Of course he’d tried cigarettes a couple of times in high school, but Eddie wasn’t a smoker.  Now, though, he found the lighter, placed a Camel in between his teeth, and, after a few unsuccessful tries, lit up.  He coughed torrentially at his first inhale, and at his second one too.  The burn of it in his throat created a sensation similar to crying.  Finally, he took a long, shaking breath in and exhaled a stream of smoke into the air, feeling the remnants settle into his lungs.  The employee entrance faced the back of a Costco warehouse.  If not for the glowing end of his cigarette, the unbroken darkness would have swallowed him up just like it had swallowed her an hour earlier.  He wondered where she was now.

The unfamiliar sensation of smoke was making his eyes water.  Blinking softly, Eddie leaned back against the white face of the WalMart, took another drag, and tried to go back to not thinking.

Dallas Noble is a writer and musician from Hopewell, New Jersey. They currently reside in Delaware with the other members of their string quartet, the Trellis String Quartet, and a plethora of other musical friends.