Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 28 - Baggage

Photo by Linus Belanger on Unsplash

Sunlight seeped between the slatted blinds, first as thin narrow lines before lengthening into wide arcs projected upon the walls like luminescent shelves. As he watched, orange light found its way to every corner of Gordon’s bedroom almost precisely as it had forty years prior, the first time it was the day after he’d buried his wife.   

But now, rather than wallowing in his despair and grief as he first had when Marie died, Gordon sat on the end of his bed awash in a strange peace that was both comforting and unfamiliar. Overnight he’d made a resolution.

Next to his feet was a suitcase, the same khaki-colored one with the navy blue strap and buckle that he and Marie purchased before their honeymoon. Rather than sleeping, throughout the night Gordon decided what was most important to keep with him in the luggage and set about packing it, slowly and deliberately.  Inside he placed a single pair of dress slacks and one white button-down Oxford shirt. Next to those he added his only three pairs of shorts that also typically stayed stowed away in his dresser, along with his toiletry bag and all of his underwear. He then tucked one pair of black socks and his leather belt inside his dark brown dress shoes and slipped the pair into the large pocket on the outside of the suitcase.

Down the small hallway in the tiny spare room where he and Marie had hoped to one day tuck children to bed, he found four shoeboxes and a large rectangular cardboard box. The cardboard box was something he had long tossed out but here it was again. It was from the large window fan he’d purchased for their bedroom when Marie was constantly overheated, tossing blankets off of herself in a near delirium during her last few weeks of life.

As he browsed through the dresser drawers like he was on a window shopping trip, Gordon filled the shoeboxes sparingly. Hardly any of the trinkets that he once held dear seemed that important anymore.

In one drawer Gordon found remnants of his childhood that — now that he was in his thirty-year-old body once again — shouldn’t have seemed like so long ago. But his mind was still that of a seventy-year-old widower who had lived under the shadow of memories for more years than should have been permitted. 

Another drawer contained a giant penny that his grandfather had gifted him. For nearly his entire life Gordon had kept it safe inside an old jewelry box that was tattered on the edges, the little blanket of cotton inside still surprisingly soft and white.  There was a set of keys that opened locks Gordon could no longer recall.  And photographs — endless stacks of Polaroid pictures with grainy brown and orange hues — bound together with thick rubber bands.  On some, Marie’s curly-cue cursive provided narratives on the wide bottom margins of the photographs.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

He flipped through them slowly, making a copy of them in his mind. Many of them were photos of Marie. Over the years these same photos had accompanied him amongst tears that dampened his pillow as he fell into a restless sleep — alone — after her death.  But now, rather than grief, Gordon felt the strange comfort of nostalgia, like unexpectedly hearing a classic rock song for the first time in ages. Gordon realized he was smiling. He hadn’t done that much smiling in recent years.

After absorbing each photo one by one, he set them back in the dresser, orderly, and sealed them in darkness.  It was a comfortable farewell, leaving all these things to be discovered by someone else in some distant future when they would likely be discarded as nothing more than a stranger’s useless mementos.  

Going through every cabinet and compartment, he took only what was truly needed and said goodbye to all the rest. It was an auspicious farewell, one Gordon could never have imagined after so many years of grief.  Yet somehow, finding himself in this strangely familiar world, wearing clothes he’d long ago outgrown but now fit into once again, with tufts of hair upon his head that had decades before slipped away within the bristles of his comb, a firm resignation came upon him that there was no need to live out his self-imposed lifetime of mourning once again.

Rather than amplifying his years of grief, seeing Marie’s casket once more that day somehow lifted his spirits, just as the photographs had.  The heavy anvil in his heart that weighed him down and left him limping along through life for so many years fell instantly away as if it was no more than a feather caught up on a breeze, salient and free, set alight upon a current, unconcerned with where it might land.

In the kitchen, Gordon found his old checkbook and tucked it in his back pocket. Would these even still work? Was the economy even still operational? He didn’t know, but he thought he’d stop by the bank just in case someone would be there to open it.  If some banker did show up, he imagined he wouldn’t be the only customer making a large withdrawal that morning.

After loading the suitcase and just two of the shoe boxes into the trunk of his car, Gordon returned to the kitchen and drank a single cup of black coffee as he sat silently one last time at the round kitchen table.   

Though he had no intention of returning, he locked the door behind him. Taking a left out of his driveway he coasted through Burkett’s still relatively empty streets. He turned on the radio, unsure if there would be anything there, and was surprised to hear it tuned into the middle of a Huey Lewis song. After a few seconds, he turned it off again and instead drove in silence.  Gordon felt like he was still sifting through photographs.

Gone were the bars on all the windows, the “We Buy Gold” storefronts and pawn shops, the grime on the sidewalks, and the trash in the gutters. He came upon the standalone dry cleaner that would eventually get torn down and replaced with a Taco Bell, then past the Woolworth’s and Harvey’s Liquors before finally sliding into the empty parking lot in front of the darkened windows of Hewing Grocery.

There was no alarm system to disarm upon unlocking the door but he still locked the door after entering. The chill of the store in the early morning rushed over him. How had he forgotten how cold the store was in the mornings? That, and the scent of cardboard and produce. These sensations were all just remnants of a time long swallowed up by a world that sought to crush simple places like Hewing Grocery.

Gordon took a cart from the rack near the front door and started to push it toward the far right aisle. A faint squeak came from the back wheels.

“I remember this cart,” Gordon whispered to himself.

The store never needed more than ten carts in total but this one was always problematic, sticking, and would veer off to the right.  One lady - what was her name? Mrs. Carmichael.  That’s right.  Mrs. Carmichael always seemed to gravitate to this cart and she’d ram it into the shelves every ten feet until Gordon finally got her a different one.

“One of these days I’ll get that fixed, Mrs. Carmichael,” he’d tell her.  “It’s the cart.  Not you.”

Today, Gordon kept using that cart with the squeaky wheels and he smiled again as he filled it with apples and multiple blocks of cheese. Stepping behind the small deli counter, he sliced several pounds of roast beef, ham, and turkey, wrapping the meat in tight bundles with white paper and sealing them with butcher’s tape.  He grabbed all three bags of cat food from the same aisle where he kept paper towels and toilet paper and found a cooler in the backroom that he filled with two bags of ice from the same freezer unit as their small selection of ice cream. 

Pushing the cart to the front register, Gordon slowly bagged the groceries in brown paper bags. He relished how the bags felt, how they sounded, and even smelled. Then he opened the register and emptied out all the cash, including a fifty-dollar bill that was tucked under the change tray.  

Gordon then pushed his cart through the doors of Hewing Grocery, locking them behind him.

Hewing Grocery cart.