Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 46

You and Jason enter Sparrow’s, passing women in work vests with nametags bobbing from their breasts who straighten packages and dust and say hello to you; Jason barely acknowledges them and so you do the same. When Mrs. Took asks how your mother is doing, you just shrug. You know a lot about these women, overheard during your mother’s coffees with the fire wives: Teri Hauser is drinking again, and Nancy Denver is stealing from work, and did you hear about Kathy Carillo and Jean Bishop getting caught together? Bonnie Gold is talking with Mr. Joe, the owner of Joe’s Market where you are sent to get your mother’s cigarettes and who weekly brings the firemen bags of food as thanks for saving his store when it burned last year. God damned firetrap, is what Dan Bell said. We oughta be glad that chink doesn’t sell fireworks, too.

The last aisle in the very back of Sparrow’s is a meager selection of baby toys and action figures; you don’t understand why Jason wants to go here versus the superior Jack-In-The-Box store two doors down, until you see him rip open the packaging and stuff the figures into his pockets. Don’t do that! you spit, horrified, because stealing is the worst.

Shut up, Jason snaps. Hurry up, take some. He slaps two of them into your hands.

Neither of you notices Margaret Bacon, the assistant manager, filling the end of the aisle until it is too late; she is enormous, her sides like accordions and the underside of her arms like water balloons as she huffs towards you, her glaring eyes lost in the folds of her face. And what do we have here? she says, her voice happy. Jason tries to run but you’re in the way; Margaret grabs a handful of his hair and holds him in place, turning his pockets out, the figures falling on the floor. Jason kicks her; if she feels it she shows nothing. Instead she shakes him hard. You want me to call your parents?

Go ahead, Jason says defiantly, my dad’s John Van Meter and he –

I know who your daddy is, she says, still refusing to let go. Her eyes latch onto you. And don’t think I won’t call yours, neither. Her voice is rising; she wants people to hear. You’ve never been so embarrassed, the white hot creep of it spreading up your neck and face – the Bacons are trash, everybody says so, and they thrive on messy public fights; you know she’ll call your father, and then she’ll put your picture up in the window and write THIEF under it so that everybody knows.