Matt Cowper - The Clerk

“Nothing, Kara,” he said calmly. “I think we’re done. You shoved me away, and I guess you expected me to keep crawling after you like a desperate teenager, and when I didn’t, it hurt your ego. You just came here to prove you can pull me back in if you want to.”

“But — I’m standing here crying, and you’re so calm…”

“Well, that should tell you something, shouldn’t it?”

Abruptly the sobs stopped, almost as if they hadn’t been real at all. Kara straightened up and wiped her hands across her face. Makeup streaked, making her look goth and sinister. Thomas felt like she was about to slap him , and he readied himself in the hope that he could block it and avoid the indignity.

“This isn’t over,” she hissed. She glared at him for a few more seconds, then turned and marched away. Thomas watched her blocky body until it was out of sight, then slowly resumed his pickle-stocking.

He smiled at how he’d manfully rebuffed her. Reggie, that bastard, would have been proud. What the fuck was she thinking, coming in here and acting like that? Crying and wailing like he was her One True Lover, and then doing an about-face and hissing at him like a viper…

But his sense of pride and power slowly ebbed. Her last words were already haunting him. What did she mean, it wasn’t over? If she wanted revenge, what could she conceivably do to him? His mind played out various scenarios, from the reasonable (she could come bother him at work, maybe claim he was sexually incompetent in front of other employees) to the sensational (she could slash off his limbs with a chainsaw and then feed his dismembered parts to a bunch of mud-wallowing pigs).

Kara’s eyes were usually as lively as bedridden invalids, but as she’d said her last words there had been holy fire in them. That did not bode well.

Well, he comforted himself, at least no one besides Orianna had seen what happened. The last thing he wanted was a lot of gossip floating around the store.

He was fooling himself, of course. Vernon was the first to accost him.

“Who was that girl you were jawing with?” he asked, leering as if he’d just caught Thomas making out with someone in the walk-in cooler.

“No one,” Thomas replied, frowning. “Just a friend.”

“I know better than that. I saw, I heard. I’ve got eyes, I’ve got ears. Seemed like you two were having a row.”

“No, we weren’t.”

“Alright, fine, be tight-lipped. You can handle your own affairs. But in my opinion, she looked a bit soggy to me — if ya know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Thomas growled.

“Well, uh, you’ll figure it out. Now — we still have four boxes of those gosh durn green beans back here? Don’t people want to eat their veggies?”

Next was Eldridge, and this surprised Thomas, since Eldridge usually avoided gossip, and talking in general.

“Did I hear you made some girl cry?” he grunted.

After Thomas had recovered from this startling question — which took far too long, judging by the impatient look on Eldridge’s bulldog face — he croaked out: “No, I didn’t. She — uh — has a lot on her plate. Gettin’ to her. Stress. You know.”

“Well, if you did make her cry, she probably deserved it. I been married twice, and both of ’em were fit to strangle. You gotta make ’em cry sometimes just to keep ’em honest.”

Thomas knew nothing about Eldridge’s previous marriages. He pictured gray, church-going, bridge-playing women trying to nag the un-naggable Eldridge. He could not imagine what sex had been like, because he couldn’t imagine Eldridge young and virile.

“Uh — I don’t plan on getting married,” Thomas said.

“Good choice,” Eldridge said spitefully. “If I’d’a stuck to that when I was young, I would’ve saved myself a lot of time and money.”

Thomas nodded and retreated to the back room.

Next was Cynthia, who came at him with wide, sympathetic eyes and clasped hands, as if he were a refugee just escaped from a war zone.

“I heard something happened,” she caressed. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” Thomas snapped.

“Oh. OK. Just thought I’d ask.”

He immediately regretted what he’d done, and he followed the slumped and pouting Cynthia a few steps, intent on stopping her and apologizing. Then he said to hell with it, people needed to stay out of his business. This whole goddamn store was one big den of gossip, just a bunch of nibbling little rodents trying to find something interesting to chew on.

But he was being too harsh. The people who had asked him about Kara were his friends, or at least his acquaintances. They were concerned, not nosy.

To hell with them! He’d be damned if he apologized to any of them!

He watched Cynthia sullenly slice some roast beef for a boot-wearing commercial fisherman, and was alternately remorseful and unrepentant.

Finally, Orianna ventured down the aisle where he was wiping down shelves.

“Hey, uh, didn’t mean to intrude earlier,” she said warily. “Hope everything’s OK.”

“It is,” Thomas replied in curt dismissal.

Orianna returned to her register quickly, leaving Thomas again agonizing over his actions, and then stubbornly insisting they were just and even courageous.

It was the night of the Oxendine’s Grocery Christmas Party. Thomas sped happily towards downtown Morehead City as other drivers stared at his vehicle in rebuke. Though many employees thought the Party was schmaltzy, and either suffered through it or came up with a lame excuse to avoid attending, Thomas loved it. He could be casual with the people he worked with; there were no shelves to stock, groceries to bag, or carts to retrieve from the lot. They could talk, eat, drink (everyone of age was encouraged to bring alcohol, and the employees not of age spent the evening trying to avoid Yolanda’s watchful eye so they could steal a drink or two) and be merry.

Following the Party’s potluck injunction, Thomas had brought a pre-made chocolate cheesecake along with a six-pack of Bud Light. Some employees conveniently forgot to bring something, but most arrived with at least one item of food or drink. Thomas expected to see Maureen’s pigs-in-a-blanket, Eldridge’s miraculously delicious meatloaf, and Eddie’s gooey mac’n’cheese. (“It’s good, ain’t it? Tell me that ain’t good!”) What the newer employees would bring was a mystery; some of them had promised to bring a meticulously-prepared dish that would dazzle the tastebuds, but those people usually showed up with a bag of potato chips and a jar of french onion dip.

Thomas pulled down a side street and parked near the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce’s headquarters. The Party was officially held in the Chamber’s conference room, though it spilled out into all sections of the building. Vernon had commandeered this building for the Party for decades; it seemed impossible that it could be held anywhere else. One infamous year, however, the Party’s location was uncertain, as the new Chamber president — a small, squat man whose most frequent statement was “The problem with this country is that no one wants to work hard anymore” — decided to flex his newly-granted muscle and deny Vernon’s request/demand for use of the Chamber building because of “scheduling conflicts” — though the real reason was because Vernon had made questionable comments about his penny loafers one day at the grocery store. Vernon fumed: “By God, I’ll show that good-for-nothing namby-pamby stick-in-the-mud what’s what!” He “got on the horn,” and the president was soon besieged by angry calls from Chamber members on behalf of “our good friend, Vernon Oxendine,” specifically concerning “his Christmas Party, which has been held at the Chamber of Commerce building since before you were a glint in your daddy’s eye.” (This wasn’t close to being true, but it got the point across.) The president backed down, though he complained to his wife that “they ganged up on me, those bastards. Let me take ’em one on one, then I’ll show ’em something!”