Page 11 of Too Old for This

I waited too late to go to the grocery store. Now it’s filled with people who have just gotten off work, picked up the kids, or are on their way home from yoga class. My fault. I should’ve come by earlier instead of taking a long bath.

All I need are the ingredients to make a stuffed chicken roll, but I end up with another package of cookies as well.

The automated checkout is shut down due to technical problems, so everyone is forced to wait for a live person. My cart is not full, not even close, yet someone is already complaining.

“She’s going to take forever.”

Three teenagers are behind me. They’re wearing slouchy clothes and are full of angst, staring at their phones as they huff and puff their frustration. One holds a basket filled with soda and chips. Perhaps they don’t know there is a specific line for those with fifteen items and under.

I could tell them that. I could also keep my mouth shut and let them wait as I check out, reinforcing their belief that old people are slow, senile, and useless. Or I could let them go ahead of me and fantasize about ramming them with my shopping cart.

I turn around.

“You only have a few items. Why don’t you go ahead of me?”

They don’t look up from their phones.

“Excuse me,” I say.

One finally glances up. A lock of hair hangs right between his eyes, almost to the tip of his nose, and he has the slightest bit of stubble on his chin.

“What?” he says.

“Do you want to go ahead of me?”

He blinks and nudges his friends, motioning for them to move. All three scramble past as I try to back up my cart.

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

I don’t think about breaking his legs, just his two friends’. It’s the little things that get me through the day.

—

I didn’t always fantasize about things like that. Not until Gary. If you divided my life into sections, there would be a big line separating before Gary and after Gary.

We met when I was a single, childless woman working as a bank teller. Gary was a customer. He was a quiet guy that I barely noticed until we ran into each other at a dance club and I was reminded of his existence.

“You’re the girl from the bank,” he said. Gary looked like a lot of guys back then, with his open-neck shirts and white slacks. He was clean-shaven and smoked a lot, but he didn’t wear dark glasses at night. That was a plus.

“My name is Lorena. Not ‘girl from the bank.’?”

“Cute. Wanna dance?”

I did. A club wasn’t the best place to have a conversation, but that was fine with me. Escape was on my agenda. I wanted a few hours away from the disappointment of adulthood, which seemed a lot more exciting before it was real.

Gary and I drank, danced, and shouted words to each other over the music. Then we went outside for some air.

Between cigarette puffs, he asked if I wanted to go back to his place. You bet I did. Along with the clubs and drinking and smoking pot, sex was one of the best distractions. I was already starting to wonder how I’d make it through the next fifty years. I couldn’t understand how anyone did.

Gary was older than me, in his early thirties, and he had his own house. I had a tiny apartment and felt lucky to live alone.

His bedroom had a queen-size bed with a green coverlet, oddly placed mirrors around the room, and a felt pennant for Washington’s new football team, the Seattle Seahawks. Gary kept the lights off while we had sex. The whole thing came and went so fast I thought I had missed it.

He pushed himself off the bed right after. “Let’s take a shower.”

Who was I to argue with cleanliness. It couldn’t be any worse than the sex.

I soaped up his back, he soaped up mine. I dabbed his nose with bubbles, he kissed mine. And so on.

For the first time, we were naked under a bright light. Then I asked him the wrong question. I was still young and dumb and didn’t know you should never ask a question if you don’t want to hear the answer.

“Still think I’m cute?”

Gary tilted his head to the side and took a step back, appraising my body from head to toe. He nodded and wrapped his arms around me. I slid my leg up the side of his.

“Still pretty cute,” he said.

“ Pretty cute?”

“You’re not as young as I thought. What are you, thirty?”

“I’m only twenty-eight.”

“Right.” He slid a hand down my back, to my butt. “I just figured…single girl, works as a bank teller, never married, and no kids? I assumed you were twenty-one, maybe twenty-two.”

Anger rose up inside me, a bubble trying to escape, impossible to push back down. Gary had no idea who I was or where I had come from. He didn’t know that I’d left home with nothing, or how hard it was just to get the life I had. Yet he judged me anyway.

“But you—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

The only thing worse than being judged is being dismissed.

Neither was new to me. But my reaction was.

I don’t know exactly what I was thinking when I pushed him backward. Or when my foot hooked his ankle, pulling his leg out from under him. I can still feel his hands sliding off my butt as he fell. His head hit the faucet handle, the spiky kind made of acrylic and solid chrome.

Crack.

The sound has stayed with me.

To avoid getting knocked down with him, I jumped out.

That was it. One minute, Gary was standing. The next, he was lying on the shower floor with blood dripping from the back of his head. I leaned down to check if he had a pulse, put my hand in front of his mouth to see if he was breathing. No to both.

I thought about calling for an ambulance. Really, I did. But I barely knew this man. I was a little drunk and a little high, and Gary had drugs in his place. It wasn’t entirely my fault he had slipped and ended up dead. I only pushed a little.

The decision turned out to be a simple one from a simpler time, when there were no gadgets, no internet, no traffic cams. No DNA testing.

I got dressed, washed our glasses, and made his bed, making it look like Gary had come home alone. I even left the water running in the shower.

The next time I saw Gary, his picture was in the paper. Accidental death.

I kept waiting and waiting to feel some remorse, but it never came. Instead, I felt better. For a while, anyway. I didn’t realize how much anger I had until it was gone.

Eight years later, when Detective Burke asked who my son’s father was, I couldn’t tell him any of that.