Eleven minutes was all I had left on the clock last Tuesday when the cart slammed onto my register belt hard enough to rattle the candy display.
I looked up. A woman in a cream coat and pearl earrings glared back at me as if I’d personally ruined her afternoon.
Behind her, six other customers stood with their mouths half open, still trying to process the fact that she’d cut the entire line.
“Hurry up,” she snapped. “Some of us have real lives.”
The cart slammed onto my register belt.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, and started scanning.
Her shopping cart was overflowing with baby clothes, diapers, bottles, and a breast pump.
My back was screaming and my ankles felt like water balloons. But I kept my face neutral and my hands moving. Something about her face nagged at me: the line of the jaw, maybe, or the way her mouth pulled down at the corners, but I was too tired to chase it.
But she wasn’t finished.
My back was screaming.
“Can you even reach the scanner over that big, bulging belly?” the woman complained.
An older woman two lanes over turned her head sharply.
“Excuse me?” I said quietly.
“You need to move faster. I don’t have all night to watch you waddle.”
I felt my cheeks go hot, but I didn’t answer. I just kept scanning.
“Can you even reach the scanner?”
Wipes. A pacifier set. A tiny pink sleeper with little rabbits on it.
That last item made my throat tighten because I’d looked at the exact same sleeper last week and put it back because it wasn’t in the budget.
“Girls like you,” the woman said, loud now, loud enough that the whole front end of the store went still, “get pregnant just to trap decent men.”
Then she laughed as if she’d said the funniest thing on earth.
That last item made my throat tighten.
The checkout area went quiet.
Someone gasped. A teenager near the gum rack lifted his phone, and I heard the little click of a recording starting.
I didn’t cry. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry at work anymore, not since the second trimester. I kept scanning.
“Ma’am,” a voice behind her said flatly, “I think you might be the saddest person I’ve ever seen buy baby clothes.”
It was a man in a blue jacket, arms crossed, unimpressed.
I almost laughed. I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t.
A teenager near the gum rack lifted his phone.
The woman spun on him. “Mind your own business!”
“You made it everyone’s business, lady!”
She turned back to me, jaw tight, and threw her credit card onto the belt as if it burned her fingers.
“Just finish.”
I glanced down at her credit card, then picked it up.
She turned back to me.
My eyes went to the name printed across the front.
My hand stopped moving. The little beep of the scanner cut off mid scan.
That nagging feeling clicked into place all at once. I slowly looked back up at her and really looked at her for the first time. The sharp cheekbones. The slight downturn of her mouth. The pearl earrings I’d seen in a Christmas photo taped inside Jake’s dresser drawer.
My heart felt like it had stopped!
My hand stopped moving.
For the first time, I realized I was staring at the woman from every single family photo on my boyfriend’s nightstand.
It was his mother, Lydia.
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