Adam Johnson - Emporium

Later, after Jane leaves to find Ruthie and take her home for the evening, I’m sitting in the shop when Mrs. Espers comes in. She looks a little down, is holding the vest like it’s made of burlap and I know the feeling: it’s been one of those days for me too.

“How was the support group?” I ask as I fill out her receipt.

“I’ve crossed the line,” she says.

“How’s that?”

“I’m not afraid of flying anymore.”

I’m not sure what this means in terms of her group, of whether she’ll no longer be needing my services, but you know, I say, “Great, congratulations.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she says with a certain formality.

“Wow, good, good.”

She pauses at the sight of her held-out receipt and shakes her head no. “I’m sorry, Bill, but I’ve made the decision.”

She says this and leaves, and I’m left thinking she’s decided to go to the Emporium to make the purchase. I figure some flying counselor talked her into the idea of permenant protection, but it is when I go to throw her vest atop the “in” stack, when I remove the titanium trauma plate, that I know she will never wear a vest again. The shiny titanium is lead-streaked, and as I rub my thumb in the indention some bullet has made, I can still feel her body heat on it.

I float out into the parking lot and watch her red taillights disappear into the night, and know that she’s right, she’s free, that nobody gets shot in the heart twice. I stand in a handicapped parking spot, rubbing the titanium, and I lean against the old shopping cart bin. The faint laughter of distant gunfire comes from the direction of the rail yard, and I look at the lighted windows of the few shops left in the mall, but can only see the darkened stores between them. In my hands, the bright titanium reflects the stars my fourteen-year-old already knows by heart, but I no longer have it in me to look up, to lift my head to the place of our dreams, Jane’s and mine, when we were eighteen.

I wander the mall, waiting for my wife to return, something that takes longer and longer these days. She gets a little melancholy now and then, needs a little space to herself, and I understand; these are hard times we’re living in. Leaving the shop wide open, I head for Godfather’s. But when I get there, I’m confused because I see my daughter through the window, the girl my wife said she was taking home.

Ruth is leaned up against an ancient Donkey Kong machine, talking to a delivery boy on a backward chair. She is wearing her training vest with nothing on under, you can tell, and this boy stares at the exposed plane of her stomach. She has her cheek against the side of the video game, chatting about something, while the boy subtly marvels at how the fine hairs around her navel hum pink in the neon beer light, and I am roaring through the door. I walk right up to my daughter and thump her trauma plate to hear the squish of a cigarette pack and the crack of a CD case. Out of the pocket that should cover her heart forever, I pull Aerosmith and menthols.

I grab her by the wrist. “Where’s your protection?”

“Jesus, Dad,” she says and starts to dig in the backpack at her feet.

The pizza boy looks like he’s about to pipe in, and I wheel on him, “Your parents don’t love you.”

“Dad, nobody wears their vests to school. I’m a total outcast.”

This is my daughter. This is the age she is at.

Jane eventually returns, finds me watching Cool Hand Luke in the dark store, and neither of us says anything. She puts her hands on the counter when she comes in and I ask no questions about where she’s been. I place my hands on hers, stroke the backs of her fingers, and then turn out the lights, closing up shop a little early.

Lately we have taken to cruising late at night under the guise of R&D. We’ll pull the tarp off the ’72 Monte Carlo her mom left us, the car Jane used to run wild in. It has the optional swivel passenger seat, black leather, that can turn 180 degrees. We grab the foam cooler and Jane swivels the seat all the way around so her feet are on the backseat and her head reclines to the dash, so she can watch me drive her wherever she wants to go. We’ll glide by the boarded-up Ice Plant where we once drank on summer nights, feet dangling off the loading ramps. We prowl past by the Roadhouse with our lights off and count the Ninja motorcycles lined up out front. The cemetery these days is fenced and locked and a security guard cruises the old stadium in a golf cart, but we circle nonetheless.

Midnight finds us rolling through the waves of the old Double Drive In, the gravel crunching under our tires, the Monte Carlo’s trunk bottoming out like it used to, and all the broken glass, beer caps, and bullet casings now sparkle like stars.

We park and sit on the warm, ticking car hood and look off at the Emporium across the street. We have his-and-hers binoculars, 7X40s from her father on our tenth anniversary, and we sit here, side by side in the dark, as we check out their customers. We train our lenses at the bright displays. Jane rolls her focus in and out.

“Is that Fred Sayles?” she asks. “By the baby armor.”

I focus in on him fondling the competition’s goods. “That son of a bitch.”

“Remember the night he streaked through the second feature?”

“We all turned on our headlights. The Day the Earth Stood Still , right?”

“ Plan Nine From Outer Space ,” she says. “Remember window speakers?”

“Remember high-point beer.”

“Nash seats.”

“Trunkloads.”

“Keys left in the ignition.”

“ Mars Invades .”

We both look up.

II

It is a moment near the end of things, a point at which, seated in a lawn chair amid the vast emptiness of a Kmart parking lot, Jane is forced to reflect. Her husband is giving driving lessons to her daughter, who loops circles around Jane in the old Caprice they are now reduced to driving. The circles are big and slow, impending as Jane’s thoughts, which come to focus on the notion that Ruthie’s sixteen, and Bill should have taught her this a year ago.

The Caprice stops, backs up, parallel parks between a pair of worn yellow lines somehow chosen from the thousands in front of the closed-down discounter. It’s just like Bill, she thinks, to worry about lines when there’s not another car for miles. Jane lifts her hand and the sun disappears. In this brief shade she notices the moon, too, is up there.

Check your mirrors, she can hear Bill say, even from here, as he trains her daughter to always, always be on the lookout. But Jane knows Ruthie’s come to be on intimate terms with her blind spot. It’s one of the few things they share these days.

Behind her their small rental store is empty. These days, the final ones, he has a VCR running all day in the shop. Over her shoulder she can hear the melancholic coo of Jailhouse Rock —Bill’s choice today — and it feels like it is their whole history looming behind them: the mom-and-pop store, those liberal-arts dreams, their own let’s put on a barn dance notion of being their own bosses, here, in a strip mall. She has the cordless phone with her, but it doesn’t ring, has not in we don’t talk about how long, and Jane reclines some in the heat, points her feet toward the horizon.

Look out, Bill yells, you just hit a Volvo, and slaps the dash for effect, leaving Ruthie momentarily breathless: she swivels her head to see the chrome and glass she must have missed, but there is only forty acres of empty parking.

The sun swoops low, Ruthie pedals off to junior-varsity swim practice, and no, Jane says, not The Treasure of Sierra Madre again. On the counter before them are two dozen bulletproof vests frayed to the point that they wouldn’t stop slingshots and sixty or seventy videos Bill got cheap when the Video-Utopia store closed three stores down. And here’s where we are, Jane thinks, between a Chapter 11 pizza joint and a store that has made the switch from water to spirits. This is the place we are at, around the corner from the drive-in theater where she and Bill spent their youth, a place she won’t even look at because these days, even worse than hope, nostalgia is her enemy.