Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

She picks up a liter of Diet Pepsi with one hand and a bag of potato chips with the other and lugs them to the register. Billy removes a newspaper from the rack and takes a city map from a second rack clipped to the wall. The black woman and Billy reach the register at the same time. She shoots Billy a sharp look: another pushy young white man. Not him. No way. He turns and checks out the candy stand.

She plunks the plastic jug and chips on the counter, sighs audibly and waits for the Chinese woman to acknowledge her presence. The black woman clears her throat, gets no response. She works a wrinkled envelope from her back pocket and studies a list written on it. Pressing the envelope flat on the counter she plucks a ball-point pen from a jar of pens next to the register, leans over the envelope and checks off the first two items on her list. Billy looks around her shoulder and reads the words written on the envelope in large hand-drawn capitals:

ATM

FOOD

PAY ELECTRIC

GET HAIR DONE

CALL ETHYLEEN

Something about the list tightens Billy’s stomach into a fist. It’s as if her whole life is written there. Charlotte will have already gone to the ATM and run her twenty-something-dollar bank balance down to zero. Check. Now she buys a liter of Diet Pepsi and a bag of potato chips for breakfast. Check. After Charlotte eats her breakfast sitting alone on a bench at the bus stop on Alton and Lincoln Road she’ll walk to the Florida Power & Light office at the Stop & Shop on West, where she’ll pay her overdue electric bill in cash because her checks have bounced too many times. Check. Charlotte will head for Jeannie’s Cut-Right Cut-Rate Beauty Nook to get a wave put back in her hair. Seven bucks. Check. Now that she’s feeling pretty Charlotte will buy a dollar phone card and call Ethyleen on her cell phone to tell her about it. Check. Then she’ll take the bus back to Overton and walk to her building and step over toys and trash and broken glass up to her third-floor apartment. She has a teenage son who’s supposed to be in school but is shooting hoops over at Franklin Park and an unemployed boyfriend who says he’s looking for a job but has long since given that up and instead hangs in the ’hood getting high with his posse. She’ll draw the shades in the cluttered bedroom, take off her clothes and put on a shortie nightgown. She’ll set the alarm clock for 5:00 P.M. so she can make it back to the hospital in time. The night shift. Charlotte wraps her hair in a scarf, lies down in the unmade bed and immediately falls asleep. Check.

That’s it, her life’s checklist. Billy wonders what kind of list he’d make that would do the same for him.

BUY NEWSPAPER AND CITY MAP

FIND NEW PLACE TO LIVE

GO TO WORK

ASK TO GET PROMOTED FROM BUSBOY TO WAITER

MOVE STUFF TO NEW PLACE AFTER WORK

Five items — the same number on his list as on Charlotte’s. Suddenly he’s angry at the Chinese woman for making Charlotte wait for no good reason. The woman seems to be deliberately ignoring him and his new friend.

“Hey, Missus! You got payin’ customers here!”

The Chinese woman slowly turns and looks at him. She’s chewing on a toothpick. For a few seconds she studies the items in his hands — the newspaper and map — and the two in Charlotte’s — Diet Pepsi and bag of chips. She switches the toothpick from one side of her mouth to the other.

“Why you in such a big hurry?”

He’s embarrassed now and wishes he’d let Charlotte make the complaint or just waited until the lady was ready to take their money. “I… I got to take a piss.”

“No public restroom here.”

The woman ambles to the register and rings up Charlotte’s Diet Pepsi and chips and drops them into a plastic bag. Charlotte pays with four singles, grabs the change and without looking back walks quickly out to the street. Billy jiggles and hops up and down a couple of times as if he really does have to take a piss. The Chinese woman moves in slow motion, picks up his newspaper and map from the counter and runs them under the scanner.

When he opens his wallet all he has are two singles and a twenty. His last twenty till payday. The paper and the map together come to $6.45. He passes the twenty to the woman.

“This all you got? Too early to make change.”

“Where can I get it changed?”

“Go to bank on the corner. They open at nine.”

“That’s like an hour and a half. I gotta get to work.”

“Not my problem.”

“I only got enough change for the paper.”

“So buy paper.”

Billy pays her with two quarters and makes for the door where he stops and turns back. “You know that woman in front of me?”

“She come in here all the time.”

“So why did you make her wait like that? Seriously. That wasn’t nice, lady.”

“She on drugs. She all the time try to steal from us. Goodbye,” the Chinese lady says and slams shut the cash drawer. She folds her arms across her chest again and goes back to her calculations.

Billy steps outside to the sunlit street. And there is Charlotte waiting for him. She looks plaintively into his eyes. He turns away and starts walking toward Lincoln.

“Can you help me out, mister? I got to get to my job in North Miami an’ I need another dollar for the bus.”

Billy stops and checks her out top to bottom. She’s not the same person she was a minute ago. She’s changed from being invisible to everyone but Billy into a junkie visible to all. Probably a clucker, a crackhead. “What about the money you just spent in there for junk food? That was enough for a bus to North Miami.”

“I thought I had enough leftover, but I was wrong. I…”

“What about your list?”

“What list?”

“On the envelope. I seen it.”

She pulls the same envelope from her back pocket and examines it. “You want it? I’ll give it to you for a buck.”

“I mean the things you wrote there.”

“It was on the floor. Sometimes people lose envelopes with money in ’em. Even Chinese people.”

“How come you checked things on the list? Like food and ATM.”

She shrugs. “Why not?”

“Is your name Charlotte? Like it says on your shirt?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You got any spare change, then?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you, then.”

Slowly Billy pulls his wallet from his back pocket. He flips it open and removes the twenty-dollar bill and passes it to her. She takes the bill without looking at it and stuffs it into her back pocket.

She hands him the envelope.

“No thanks,” he says.

“It’s yours now. You bought it, mister.”

Billy waves his hands in front of his face.

The woman crumples the envelope in her fist and tosses it onto the sidewalk. “You have a nice day,” she says and walks away.

For a full minute Billy stands and watches her. The parrot on his shoulder says, Easy come easy go. Finders keepers losers weepers. What goes around comes around.

Billy says to the parrot, “Just shut the fuck up.”

Ed pulled the RV off the road and parked it in a small paved lot, the front bumper kissing the concrete barrier, the large pale gray vehicle facing the sea, and Alice said, “Why are we stopping?”