Jesse Goolsby - I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

The checkout man offers an enthusiastic “Hi there,” smiles, and fumbles with the sports bra, turning the garment in his hands although the barcoded tag dangles near the clasp. Brand new, she thinks. Why in the world would they give him the express line?

When he fists the first gallon of milk, Kristen says, “It’s on the front.”

“Thanks,” he says, smirking with a hint of newfound annoyance. “What team?” he says, holding up the Coach logo.

“Basketball,” she says, swallowing a cracker. “Girl’s JV. Over in Chester.”

“The Chester Volcanoes,” he says. “Cool mascot.”

It’s then that she spots Marcus twenty feet from her, pushing a cart full of groceries toward the exit with his girlfriend, Stacey. Kristen lowers her head, then peeks back up. There’s no desire or longing, just a nervous wish to avoid eye contact. She’s heard that Marcus got on with Caltrans and is making good union money working on the paving crew, and there’s a town rumor that Stacey did time for simple assault on a girl over in Greenville who called her a drunk Indian, which, as far as Kristen knows, is a fairly accurate description.

Occasionally Kristen sees Marcus’s blue Chevy truck rolling down Main Street in Chester, heading south to the aging, valley-bound highways, but he no longer shops at the Holiday market, where she still works, preferring, she’d guessed correctly, to make the forty-five-minute drive to this Walmart. Kristen watches them walk away, Stacey’s hand on Marcus’s back, her long black hair hanging down to the top of her jeans.

Kristen pays with cash and moves toward the exit, but pauses by stacks of on-sale bottled water, Lucky Charms, binders, and dog food. She doesn’t want to run into Marcus or Stacey returning their cart or discover that they’ve parked next to her, so she glances over at the bathroom entrance and grabs another saltine from her purse and peeks at a clock on the wall. She watches the second hand and decides to wait three minutes. She hears the old-man greeter welcoming people to the store, and she digs out her phone and sees the background photo of Wintric and her at a San Francisco Giants game.

Her father had given them the tickets for her birthday, five rows up from the Giants’ dugout. The Pirates intentionally walked Barry Bonds three times, but the afternoon was sunny and the stadium was even better than she had imagined, with the bay right there, the eastbound ocean breeze in her hair, and she and Wintric each downing two overpriced hot dogs before the fifth inning. In the phone’s background picture Wintric has his arm around her and she’s tucked into him, smiling under her black-and-orange-brimmed Giants hat. It was that night in an Oakland Holiday Inn Express, sunburned and exhausted and happy, that she became pregnant.

Kristen stands near the Walmart exit, one minute into her allotted three. She texts Wintric that she’s about to head home, that maybe they should order pizza for dinner. She knows he won’t see the text right away, as he’ll be finishing up splitting the pile of wood he hauled home yesterday. It was another example of his four-month roll of energy and optimism, which Kristen wants to believe can last forever, even if she talks herself into taking everything a day at a time.

When she took his last name it seemed like something she had known would always happen, something inescapable but comfortable. Already her new name sounds familiar: Kristen Ellis. She thinks of Wintric splitting the wood into fireplace-sized pieces, and she believes the war won’t live in him forever — at least not as it has — that there are too many things that happen in a life for the past always to live downstage. She believes that people are always someone different the next day. Already she sees Wintric anew as they laugh together watching Arrested Development, or as he hums while they walk along the boggy shore of Willow Lake, or as he takes in the Chester Fourth of July parade, which she hopes one day he’ll walk in with the rest of the veterans.

Recently Wintric has replaced all the ceiling fans in their place, dropped down to two OxyContins a day, with plans to kick them altogether, and surprised Kristen with lunch — freshly made turkey sandwiches — a few times at work. She trusts these things are not signs, they aren’t teasers; this is who he is. Still, she understands days rarely pass by easily, regardless of his motivation. She navigates this world and lives through the days just as he does. In the past week she’s put in five thirteen-hour days at the Holiday supermarket, changed the oil in their car, and finished the sixth Harry Potter book, all under the stress of work as a new assistant manager at Holiday and the pressing debate of whether to keep this child.

Kristen swallows, her dry throat constricts, and she feels slightly dizzy. She walks over to the drinking fountain and sips, then tracks the clock’s second hand. At three minutes she makes her move outside, playfully scolding herself for her cowardice. She surveys the parking lot for Marcus’s truck, then watches the Chevy depart from the back of the lot by the Jack in the Box.

The sun is hot on her body as she loads the items into her car’s empty back seat. She starts the car and turns onto the highway that will take her back to Chester. She rolls down Susanville’s main thoroughfare, aware that Marcus and Stacey are a few minutes in front of her, driving the same route home, and she can’t help but glance ahead to see if they’ve caught a red light, but there’s nothing.

During the drive home — up over Fredonyer Pass and down into the valleys outside Westwood — Kristen sips on a Coke, apprehensive that she’s catching up to them, so she keeps it at 50 mph and studies the road for a blue Chevy truck. Her nausea simmers and her right leg aches, and she turns off the one local radio station that plays top 40.

Up ahead she spots a dirt turnout she’s passed a hundred times on her way back and forth to Susanville and Reno, a turnout big enough for one of the few diesels that take this route. She grabs her right quad and steers her car to the turnoff. She gets out, stretches her leg, lifting her right ankle back toward her butt.

On the far edge of the turnout stands an old brick fireplace and chimney, the remnants of what Kristen guesses used to be a pioneer home. The ruin has always been a welcome sight for her, marking twenty minutes’ driving time left to Chester, but she’s never stopped here before, and she studies the old fireplace, clean from a recent rain, wondering why it was left intact. She looks south, across the valley, past grazing cattle, to the distant ridge line there, then to a hill in the otherwise flat meadow. She camped at the base of this hill once when she was twelve. Her father took her and one of her friends there and told them ghost stories and brought out kids’ bows and let them shoot arrows at the blackbirds that sat on the rotting fence posts. Kristen considers the outing: the absurdity of shooting arrows at birds that would leap away, then return to the same fence posts; losing all the arrows; the meandering cows; her earnest father and his ghost stories that scared no one. Her father, his gentle demeanor, his Sunday trips to the local Methodist church alone; her father, surprising Wintric and her with Giants tickets and a hotel in Oakland. When Kristen told her parents about her pregnancy a few nights ago, he begged her to keep the child, even though she hadn’t voiced any other plan.

Kristen stares at the hill and thinks of Marcus and Stacey hitting the Plumas County line, Wintric running the wood splitter in the back-yard heat, and this minuscule baby inside her — the only proof of its existence being two home pregnancy test results and nausea. She stares at the hill and hears the cows’ calls in the distance. Just before her cell phone rings, her father’s words return to her: “Keep the baby. Keep the baby.”