The hum is the first thing you notice. Not a sound, really, but a pressure in your ears. The fluorescent lights of the Save-A-Lot, Store #147, here in the bleached-bone suburbs of Phoenix, sing a single, agonizing note.
It’s the soundtrack to Friday evening misery, a low-grade migraine of recycled air and the smell of industrial bleach failing to mask the faint, sweet odor of overripe bananas. My retirement, as it turns out, smells like overripe bananas. When you’ve spent thirty years landing 400-ton jets in crosswinds, the civilian world feels… slow.
Unbearably slow. My ex-wife, Barbara, used to say I was “terminally calibrated.” She left me for a tennis instructor named “Sage” who teaches spiritual grounding. I’m just trying to get through the check-out line.
I’d be at Whole Foods, but the parking lot was a zoo. So here I am, at the Save-A-Lot, holding a quart of 2% milk and a box of Raisin Bran, trapped in Line 4. And Line 4 is the slowest.
The reason Line 4 is the slowest is Agnes Weaver. She’s eighty-two. I only know this because I heard another cashier mention it once.
Eighty-two, and she looks every minute of it. She’s a wisp, a bird-like creature drowning in a royal blue smock two sizes too big. Her hands, mapped with liver spots and blue veins, tremble as they move over the scanner.
It’s a mechanical, practiced tremble, the kind that’s been there so long it’s just part of the motion. “Cash or card, dear?” Her voice is like dry paper rubbing together. Most people don’t look at her.
They look at their phones. They sigh. They shift their weight.
They are mortals, furious that their march toward dinner has been momentarily delayed by another mortal’s fragility. I’m standing there, feeling the emptiness of my meticulously clean, dark-blue Lexus waiting in the parking lot, when the laughter cuts through the hum. It’s not a nice sound.
It’s sharp, like broken glass. It comes from Line 3. A woman, mid-forties, in yoga pants that cost more than my first car payment.
Her blonde ponytail is pulled so tight it looks painful. Her cart is a fortress of organic kale and kombucha. She’s stage-whispering to her friend, but it’s a performance for the whole store.
“Seriously, they couldn’t find anyone alive to work this lane?” she snorts, gesturing with her chin at Agnes. “I mean, at that age, shouldn’t she be knitting a blanket or something? It’s insulting to the rest of us trying to get home.”
Her friend titters.
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