Ken from Footwear finally snaps, shoots up a display of Nikes, puts a cluster of hollow-point rounds through a cardboard standee of Lebron. I’m kinda glad when that stupid headband is lopped off by gunfire. Always hated that thing.
Ken targets some Adidas cross trainers next. Once the magazine empties and the slide of his pistol locks back, he extracts a K-Bar from a sheath on his belt, hacks away at a rack of low-cut, poly/cotton, moisture-wicking socks with it.
We should’ve seen this coming. There were signs if I stop to think about it.
Like how he’s eaten fried chicken, like six pieces of it, every day for as long as he’s worked here. Years. He’ll put a drumstick in his mouth, work it around and around, and then when he finally pulls it out, that sucker is stripped clean.
Or like how he’ll talk about lawn mowers non-stop with anybody who’ll listen. An Exmark is better than a Scag is better than a John Deere, but not better than a Snapper, and so on.
If those aren’t signs of madness, I don’t know what is.
On the security monitors in the manager’s office, just off the break room, Ken arranges Filas in a pile, sets fire to it with a Bic. Then he starts dancing around it, whooping, clapping his hand over his mouth repeatedly. Insanity and racism make strange bedfellows.
We – the employees of The Sports Emporium – huddle together in the cramped office, amid the tattered catalogs of sporting equipment stacked on the desk and softball team Polaroids thumb-tacked haphazardly to the corkboard, while involuntarily huffing the stink of recently smoked Kools roiling off Stump from Fitness and the miasmic cloud of cotton candy body spray that seems to encase Brock from Apparel at all times. Uncomfortable as the office is, none of us can tear ourselves away from the bedlam we’re witnessing on the monitors. Not even when One-Arm Ray, the manager, starts biting his fingernails and pa-tooey-ing jagged little crescent moons on to the desk.
“I think we should call the cops,” Brock says. She adjusts a bra strap, puts her hands into the back pockets of her skin-tight jeans.
Butch from Loss and Prevention says, “In a minute.” He sips coffee from a thermal Wawa mug that has BUTCH Sharpied on the side in ginormous black letters. “I wanna see where this goes.” None of us say anything because we wanna see where this goes, too.
Jen from Team Sports pops her gum, pulls handfuls of thick, lustrous black hair into a ponytail. Hair that smells like Pantene and tickles like silk. “Guys,” she says, “we open in fifteen minutes.” Everybody ignores her.
“Y’know,” says Bob from Hunting, Fishing, and Camping, whose fifty-six-year-old nipples are always hard, “I could take him out if we still sold shotguns.” Everybody ignores Bob, too. There was an incident a couple years back, when we still sold shotguns, before Bob worked here, when a customer loaded a shell into a pump-action Mossberg 12-gauge and went to fire it, but it jammed. After that, corporate threw up its hands, declared that The Sports Emporium would never again sell firearms. They could’ve put safety measures in place, but why take the chance, was their reasoning.
A beep-beep-beep! beep-beep-beep! issues from somewhere. Jen turns and looks at me, smiles. She points at my wrist, says, “Watch, sweetness.” She looks me up and down, winks at me. I blush, silence my Timex, leave the office to look for my purse, which has my insulin in it. I scour the break room, can’t find my purse anywhere.
Oh, no.
I was late coming in, so I threw my purse under my register, booked it to the time clock.
I pop my head back into the office, scan the monitors. On one of them, I spot the grainy image of my purse – the worn, royal blue Kate Spade that Mom got for me – nestled snugly under the register, holding my insulin, my life blood, in its soft, satiny interior.
Well, shit. I gotta go out there.
I don’t tell anybody, don’t ask anybody to “cover me.” What would they cover me with, anyway? I slip out of the break room, step on to the sales floor.
In my head, Mom tells me to stay put, asks how can I be so careless.
Like she should talk.
#
Mom, an angular stick figure of a woman, had diabetes, too. Same deal as me, a type 1 diabetic. She was horrible about taking her insulin, though.
Mom was as vain as she was acidic. She’d never be caught dead in sweatpants and/or without makeup. And if she saw somebody else like that, she’d always make a snide comment about them.
Mom was a bit of a bitch.
One time she dropped me off at school, and my friend Carla rushed to the car to greet me. Carla was cute enough, but Mom talked constantly about how Carla could be cuter. “If she just, y’know, gussied herself up a little more,” Mom would say, “she’d be so cute.”
Carla who was a bit overweight, whose blonde hair was always wild and frizzy. Carla who loved a good pair of sweatpants or oversized mom jeans. Carla, always smiling – beaming – because she was just fine with how she looked. It’s why I’m friends with her: she’s the polar opposite of Mom.
Mom was a bit of a snob.
A side effect of taking insulin is that it makes you gain weight. This can happen especially if you don’t maintain a proper diet, which Mom did not.
Mom’s thing was chocolate. She loved chocolate. She was a connoisseur. Halloween night, she’d root around in my pillowcase of goodies after trick-or-treating. “Zoe, my love,” she’d say, holding up a tiny Mr. Goodbar or a mini-Kit Kat, “Hershey is trash. You want good chocolate, you get Godiva or Ghirardelli. Or a nice piece of Dove.” She kept bags and bags of Dove Promises dark chocolates in the house, and she’d plow through them. But I’d still find oodles of discarded Hershey candy wrappers in the garbage can. Candy that I hadn’t eaten. Candy that Dad hadn’t eaten because Dad’s never had a sweet tooth.
Then when I’d indulge in a piece of candy or two, Mom would dog me about taking my insulin and then dog Dad for dogging her for not taking hers. When she did take it, she’d eat like a bird, just enough to avoid full-on hypoglycemia, then be moody as fuck because her blood sugar was all out of whack.
Mom was a bit of a hypocrite.
Eventually, Mom developed neuropathy in her feet. She started walking very slowly because her feet often went numb. She went everywhere early so she could take her time, concentrate on her steps.
Dad and I had no idea it was neuropathy because Mom insisted the metformin made her tired, sluggish. I bought that even though metformin never really made me sluggish. I thought maybe it just affected people differently.
Mom was a bit of a bullshit artist.
One night the power went out at our house. When it came back on, the clocks were all screwed up, so Mom was in a tizzy about making it to work on time. She fumbled around the house, bumping into things because of her feet. Dad tried to slow her down, tried to get her to call work to let them know she was gonna be late. Mom, a shuffling tornado in a bespoke pantsuit, said something about an important meeting, can’t be late. “So fuck off, Sam,” she said to Dad.
Mom was a bit of a drama queen.
Mom hurried to the Malvern train station, purse swinging from her shoulder, laptop bag clutched in a manicured hand. When she got there, she dashed across the parking lot, hustled up the steps to the platform.
Thing is, Mom wasn’t good at hustling because of her numb feet. She stumbled, fell backward, tumbled down the unforgiving concrete steps, and hit her head. Limbs twisted at the foot of the staircase, perfectly coifed hair spilled out Carla-wild around her head, Mom suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and died. A few other commuters, coffee-stained mouths agape, stared helplessly.
Mom was a bit of a tragedy.
But I’m not gonna be.
#
From just outside the break room, I scope out the area.
There’s about fifty yards of store between me and the checkout lanes. About twenty yards from there is Ken, in all his off-his-meds, sneaker-torching glory.
I creep up to the fitting rooms, hide next to the counter where Brock once hit on a married guy who looked like Nick Nolte. After she had sex with him in one of the fitting rooms, “Nick Nolte” wound up as a hash mark on a piece of paper that Brock taped to the countertop. I glance at the tally: fourteen. So far. Stump is one of those hash marks, too, but he’ll never admit it.
A quick peek at Ken – he’s strapped on a pair of rollerblades and is doing circles around the smoldering Filas – and I dart across to the apparel racks, where Butch once caught a kid smoking a joint in the middle of a rack of Columbia parkas. Butch kicked the kid out, but not before confiscating the joint, which he shared with me and Jen later that day, after our shift. It was the first time I ever got high. And the first time I ever made out with a girl.
From there I scamper on hands and knees to the collectibles area, with the baseball cards and Philly sports team pennants and limited-edition bobbleheads and other miscellaneous tchotchkes of sports fandom. It’s where I was given the shortest, most informal interview ever, where I spoke about my customer service qualifications while One-Arm Ray looked me up and down three times and glanced at my boobs five times and said, “Uh-huh. You’re hired. When can you start?”
In the home stretch, near the checkout lanes, I flatten out on my belly, army-crawl past the end cap of Big League Chew, Bubble Tape, Hubba Bubba, Dubble Bubble, Bubble Yum, and watermelon-flavored Bubblicious. Even now, as I reach my station, I can hear the phantom primeval screams of kids who are denied those sugary chewing gums. Even now, as I quietly lift my purse out of the cubbyhole underneath the terminal and check to make sure my insulin is in there, I can hear the ghosts of prickly parents shout back, “Haven’t you gotten enough already today? We’re going home, you don’t need any more sugar!”
Relieved to the point where I’m not thinking about anything other than the fact that I’m relieved, I stand up, purse in hand, and walk back to the break room.
From behind me: “Zoe!”
It’s Ken. Crap.
I freeze, clutch my purse, hope if I stay perfectly still, he won’t see me like that T-Rex in Jurassic Park.
“Hey, Zoe!” he says. “Where is everybody?” His voice is steady. Calm, even.
I turn, slap on a smile. “Hey, Ken! Whatcha doin’ out here?” I point a thumb in the direction of the break room. “We’re about to have our team meeting.”
Ken stops rollerblading, looks at his watch. “Oh right. We open soon.”
I nod. “Yep.”
Ken, knife in hand, standing in a cloud of smoke, considers the destroyed Nikes, the bullet-ridden Adidas, the melted Filas. “I should prob’ly clean this up, huh?”
I shrug. “Might not be a bad idea.” Gesture to the standee. “Leave Lebron how he is, though. I hate that stupid headband.”
Ken goggles. “Thank you! So do I!”
The fire alarm blares, and tepid water rains down from the sprinklers.
In my head, Mom tuts, says, “Well now your hair and makeup are ruined.”
Mom was a bit of a nutbag.
She would’ve loved Ken.
END