Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 7 - The Woman with the Bicycle
In the first decade after Marie died, unconsolable grief moved into Gordon’s life like a constant companion. It lingered and spread like a decayed and unidentifiable smell that accompanied his every waking second.
Everywhere he went — down aisles at the grocery store or looking in cabinets underneath the bathroom sink — the infected wound in his heart throbbed with constant reminders of everything he’d lost.
At times Gordon didn’t know where the interminable grief ended and his new life began. He was grief. His very identity became not who he was, but who he had lost.
Some nights, as he stretched across the emptiness of the bed, he grasped at hazy memories, frantically trying to recall what happiness ever felt like. Most nights it was as if joy had never existed. There were times when he questioned if perhaps Marie had never even been there, that maybe their marriage had all been a mirage, an imaginary daydream he’d conjured on his own.
That’s how far away and dreamlike everything he once loved had become.
Even their beloved Hewing Grocery rapidly collapsed before him. Within a year of her death, their once most loyal customers crossed the Burkett Bridge, led by their pocketbooks to lower prices at the shiny new Walmart not even two miles away.
After draining the remains of their account on Marie’s pile of hospital and funeral bills, Gordon soon found himself filling out an application at the very place that decimated the quaint business that he and Marie had dreamed of together.
“So you owned that grocery store over in Burkett, eh?” Walmart’s new general manager pointed out at his first interview.
“That’s right.”
“So this won’t be, you know, sort of weird for you or anything?”
Gordon was wise enough to keep his bitterness to himself.
He started as a mere department sales associate, then associate manager, then department manager, and his life somehow became entwined with this one. With Marie gone, and all the dreams of children and quiet life in Burkett, and the peacefulness of marriage and family and Hewing Grocery, Gordon allowed himself to be swallowed up into the nothingness of mundane routines.
Paying bills on Friday nights. Endless cans of tuna.
When he’d run into his former customers on the streets of Burkett — or worse, even in Walmart itself — they’d always mournfully eulogize the passing of Gordon’s quaint storefront.
“It’s such a shame,” they’d say. “Why doesn’t anyone support local businesses anymore?”
Then Gordon would direct them to what they were looking for on the other end of the cavernous store.
There he waded through nearly forty years with only occasional bumps in pay, which were usually little more than an annual cost of living. He clocked in and he clocked out. Hundreds of co-workers and supervisors and general managers came and went around him, many of whose names had long slipped from his memory.
He was now one of the three longest-term employees at the Burkett, Ohio location. The other two were the pair of ancient bachelor brothers who led the nighttime cleaning crew. They’d been scraping out the toilets and endlessly mopping the floors since the first day the store opened.
Together, they were just three old lonely men with no lives of their own who’d surrendered their lives to a measly and mostly inconsequential paycheck.
When Gordon tripped into late-night thoughts about his decades of wearing that faded blue vest festooned with his tattered name tag, emblazoned with pins celebrating his committed service to the company, his chest would tighten.
“I’ve wasted my life, Marie,” he’d whisper. “It’s all been a waste.”
But most days he packed these thoughts down deep. He clocked in and clocked out.
“Shut up,” he’d hiss to himself, and then put on a smile and say, “Welcome to Walmart.”
On a Friday morning, though, just shy of his seventy-second birthday, even this job that he resented, but needed, would join the list of losses from Gordon’s long and unremarkable life.
He’d planned for retirement — or some vestige thereof — in just three more years. He could hold on for that much longer, he thought, and then survive his remaining years on whatever he collected from Social Security. But those three more years of paychecks were needed to make that happen.
He’d slept poorly again the night before. His lower back kept poking him awake with a sharp pain on the right side. Each time he got up and limped to the bathroom, as the urine came out in a slow dribble he convinced himself all the more that another kidney stone was forming.
“Stupid bladder,” he’d chastise his aging body.
By the time he clocked in at six o’clock that morning, he wasn’t certain he’d make it to lunch.
As he finally headed to the breakroom in the back of the store, Gordon cut through the home goods section and into one of the toy aisles. Turning left towards automotive, Gordon came upon a tiny woman precariously trying to pull down a display bicycle off of an elevated shelving rack a good two feet taller than she was.
She was in her mid-forties, at least, with triceps that sagged and flapped below her arms like water balloons. Her hair hung into her face and she pursed her lips and tried to blow it clear of her eyes.
“Ma’am, let me help you with that,” Gordon quickly offered.
“I got it,” she said without looking at him.
She stood on the lower shelf, reaching out on tiptoes as she stretched upward, one hand grasped on the bicycle’s front tire.
“Please, let me do that for you,” Gordon said. He tried to muster a smile.
A brief memory flickered through his mind, back to Hewing Grocery. One kind and elderly regular customer, whose name had sadly evaporated with the passing of years, always sought out Gordon to help him retrieve items from the top shelves in Hewing Grocery. Unlike the shelves at Walmart that stretched high up to the ceiling, the shelves in Hewing Grocery had been so short that Gordon could see right over them and take in the entire store’s view all at once.
Still at over six feet tall — though he’d long started to shrink and curl over — Gordon walked over and easily reached up past the woman and grabbed the bicycle’s other tire.
“Here we go,” he said as cheerily as he could and pulled the rest of the bicycle off the shelf.
“I said I had it, you creep,” the rotund woman blurted angrily and jumped backward away from him.
“Sorry,” Gordon said, but the woman turned suddenly and huffed away with pumping arms. Gordon was left standing in the aisle holding the bicycle as he watched the woman stomp off toward the front of the store.
Half an hour later as Gordon tossed the empty brown paper bag from his lunch into the trash, the door to the breakroom opened and Brad Droller walked in.
“Gordon, there you are,” his supervisor said and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “A few minutes?”
Brad was thin and skeletal, at least thirty years younger than Gordon, and his voice always seemed to tremble when he spoke to Gordon.
They walked wordlessly out the breakroom door, into the back warehouse, and into Brad’s small, square office with more filing cabinets than empty floor space.
“Have a seat,” Brad instructed as he settled behind his desk. Gordon had to move a cardboard box from the only other seat in the room before squeezing into the chair facing Brad.
The door opened and two other employees edged their way into the tight confines and leaned against the filing cabinet closest to Brad.
“James and Rico are going to join us for a few minutes,” Brad said.
James, who’d only worked at Walmart for a few months, stared quietly at his hands.
Rico, who at least nodded at Gordon when they made eye contact, had worked security for the store for about five years. Rico could often be found ambling about during the day, talking to the female cashiers in between rushes of customers.
“What’s going on?” Gordon asked.
“You’re a good employee, Gordon,” Brad started. “Been here a long time. But there are areas here of zero tolerance.”
“Okay,” Gordon said and could feel his stomach dropping. He was suddenly lightheaded.
He didn’t quite know why he was brought into this office, but he now suddenly knew what was about to happen.
Gordon never imagined he’d make it this long. Forty years ago when he swallowed what little pride he had and walked into this once-new superstore to fill out an application, he never imagined he’d spend more than half his life laboring under these fluorescent flickering lights that made everything ugly with a yellowish green hue.
He now instinctively knew that even this was ending. He was as certain as he’d been when the doctors said Marie still had a chance of recovery. Even then, Gordon immediately foresaw the next few months unraveling after Marie’s initial diagnosis, and everything he imagined at that moment years ago came to fruition exactly as he thought.
“See, here’s the thing,” Brad said. “We sort of just got a pretty serious accusation about you from a customer.”
“Okay,” Gordon said again.
“She signed a statement with our onsite police and everything.”
“A statement?”
“Said you grabbed her,” Brad said. “Like, you know, sexually.”
“What?” Gordon exclaimed.
James coughed into his elbow and said nothing. Rico looked at the floor.
“That’s absurd,” Gordon protested. “What about the security tapes?”
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Rico said, finally speaking up. “In the tape, we can only see your back and can’t really see your arms.”
“I was holding a bicycle!”
“Yeah, but honestly, the way the woman jumped back away from you, it looks kind of questionable,” Rico said.
“I want to see the tape,” Gordon said.
“Listen, Gordon,” Brad said. “This doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
“I’m seventy-two years old and have never been accused of something like this,” Gordon said. “It is a big deal.”
“Yeah, I know,” Brad said. “You’ll find something else.”
“You’re firing me?”
“Like I said, we have a zero-tolerance thing we have to follow. And this could be serious. We can’t risk, like, a lawsuit or something. And I can’t really vouch for you since you did have your back to the camera and everything.”
“I was helping her get a bicycle!”
“Yeah, but the video is kind of fuzzy, so we sort of have to just take the customer’s word for now.”
“So you’re firing me,” Gordon repeated.
“We’re going to have to let you go, yeah.”
Gordon stood from his seat. Brad, James, and Rico all averted their eyes.
“So that’s it?” Gordon asked.
“Well, we’ll need your vest back,” Brad said. “And listen, I’m like, really sorry about this.”
Gordon turned, threw open the door, and burst out of the room.
“Gordon, the vest!” Brad called out.
Gordon stormed past his co-workers rushing through their lunches in the break room, past the toy aisle where the bicycle was still standing there, and out the door of the place that had taken away the last remnant of every last good part of him.
As he passed through the automatic sliding doors and into the muggy summer afternoon, Gordon ripped off his vest and threw it in the trash.
