my father how the entire town was granting me a forgiveness I did not deserve. “Look,” I whispered. “People aren’t as terrible as you thought they were. As I thought they were. They want to be good.”
Even in death, Harnett was cynical. I pictured his exasperation at my undying naïveté. He told me to look more closely at their pinched and sweating faces. See the shame? They are ashamed at how they treated us. See the desperation? They are desperate to salve that shame with generosity. Their swift acceptance of you, said Harnett, has nothing to do with you. It’s about them.
“Whatever,” I said to him. “I’ll take it.”
And I did. I took that stock-boy job, and within six weeks I had moved up to checkout clerk. The first day at the register I was trembling. Conversation was the latest ritual I had to relearn; I’d already tackled how to wake up at dawn instead of dusk, how to wear bright white shirts and khaki pants without fearing exposure. For so long I’d angled my face so that people couldn’t memorize my features and mumbled so they couldn’t identify my voice—old Digger tricks. This didn’t fly in the checkout lane. Soon I discovered that nothing normalizes a person faster than seeing him scan your pudding cups and economy-size diapers. Everyone in town patronized Sookie’s, and people would wait an extra ten minutes just to go through my line, just to be able to impart two or three words of sympathy or understanding. I’d smile and nod my thanks and ask them cash or credit, paper or plastic?
There were challenges. For a while it was hard not to calculate the post-mortem value of their earrings and watches and cuff links. But eventually I learned to quit the habit, or at least stow it away. The forced conversations became less forced. I found myself inquiring about ailing spouses and troublesome pets because I honestly wanted to know. Without noticing the moment when it began to change, I started valuing each person’s life rather than their death.
Ted helped me find the cheapest one-room apartment in town, a former office space over Fielder’s Auto that stank of oil and cigarettes. I loved it. I worked forty or fifty hours at Sookie’s and paid my rent proudly. Ted didn’t let it go at that, either. Soon he was insisting I get my high school diploma.
“You’re psychotic,” I told him. “They’re not ready for that. I’m not ready for that.”
“After everything you’ve been through, you’re going to let a few little high schoolers scare you off?”
“You’re goddamn right I am,” I said.
This was one battle he could not win. How could I shut out the phantom screams coming from the weight room, the theater, or the biology lab? Instead I agreed to take my GED. Ted brought me study materials. It only took me a few hours of review to realize I was going to ace that thing. I hadn’t been a straight-A student for nothing. Twitching somewhere deeper now was another notion, one regarding a career, a real one, one involving the higher education so prized by my mother, one having nothing to do with the sacking of milk and eggs and produce.
The day before I took the GED was my eighteenth birthday, and the bank opened to me the contents of my mother’s savings account: $11,375.02. To me the figure seemed more than substantial, numerical proof of my mother’s noble squirreling of her every spare cent. I would not let her down. This sum, right down to those last two goddamn cents, would deliver me my future. This job of mine, it was just training. A few more thousand groceries and my emotions would be caught up with my mind. I folded up the bank statement and told my mother to hang on. I told myself the same thing. It wouldn’t be long.
Never would I have guessed that there were lessons to be learned not by fleeing Bloughton but by staying put. By the end of October I was happy. It was a feeling I distrusted and I was careful not to embrace it too heartily. There were lives I had almost destroyed, after all, and that was something still requiring atonement. Gottschalk had not been fired after the gruesome events at his school—he had resigned immediately. My coworkers at the grocery—enthusiastic gossipers, all of them—told me that there had been a farewell dinner for him at the local Elks’ hall and that many