I punched in for my shift feeling a little seedy and worse for wear. For one thing, I could have used a shower. I washed up a bit in Eleanor Kaminski’s bathroom, but it wasn’t enough to completely purge the funk of our exertions on her floor. I kept catching stray whiffs of Mrs. Kaminski’s talcum-powder-suntan-lotion-herbal-shampoo-spray-deodorant-cigarette-smoke bouquet—a strange, cloying, chemical mix—with undertones of my own stale sweat. I imagined everyone else catching it, too, if I let them get close enough. It would wear off, or my own sense of it would dull, as the day went on, but I still couldn’t shake that unpleasant, sticky feeling.

I was joined on the first part of my shift with a bagger I didn’t work with very often, a skinny, pale sixteen-year-old named Tommy, who stole. All the baggers knew it, but no one else who worked there seemed to. He was always five-fingering Pop-Tarts and Little Debbies and chocolate milk, and would hide back near the Shithole scarfing them down. I felt bad for him; he was a raggedy looking kid, and I figured his family was probably struggling like most of the others in that town were struggling in those days.

Tommy clocked out at three, when Sally and Jim punched in to share the busiest part of the day with me. As soon as they hit the floor, Jim was in my ear.

“I need you to do me a favor,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Come on, you don’t even know what it is.”

“I’m not going to ask Sally if she likes you,” I said. “What are you, in eighth grade?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Then what?”

“I need you to cover the second half of my shift for me tonight. Six to nine.”

“No way.”

“Please.”

“Look, man, first of all, The Hill— Mr. Byrd is probably not going to allow me to work a 9-hour shift.”

“Yeah, he will,” he said. “I already asked him, and he said if you agreed, it would be okay this one time. And you’ll get a half-hour dinner break for working a double shift. Sort of double shift, anyway.”

“And second,” I continued. “I don’t want to.”

“Aw, come on. What’s the difference, a couple more hours? There’s still plenty of Saturday night left when you’re done.”

I thought about it. I could always use the extra money, and a couple more hours wouldn’t make a lot of difference.

“All right,” I said, “but before you leave, you have to restock all the registers with bags, and clean the break room and employee bathrooms.”

“Done,” he said.

“And sweep the aisles.”

“Aw, man…”

“That’s the deal. You want to get off at six or not?”

The Hillbilly snuck up on me while I was bagging a big order and told me to take my break after I rounded up shopping carts from the parking lot. He always did that kind of thing. One minute you’d see him up there in the customer service cage, smoking and looking at something, and then next moment he was standing right behind you. I looked around for the Mormon, figuring I could pawn the cart round-up off on him—one more payout for covering for him—but he was off doing one of the other shitty jobs he’d agreed to.

There was a breeze cutting across the parking lot but it wasn’t a cooling one. The air smelled like rain. I was putting together a train of carts in one of the parking lot lanes, and as I headed off to retrieve a wayward one at the far end of a long row, the rear door of a Chevy Impala—the only car parked that far away—suddenly flung open in my path.

Eleanor Kaminski was sitting in the back seat of her car. She was wearing a tube top and cutoffs—her most fetching ensemble—but the tube top was already pulled down, and her big, beautiful were staring right at me, there in the A&P parking lot.

“Get in,” she said.

“Holy shit, Mrs. Kaminski,” I looked around, surprised as hell and commensurately jumpy.

“Just for a couple minutes,” she said. “I want to suck you.”

“I can’t,” I’m sure I sounded a little panicky. “If someone sees me…”

“Okay,” she said. “Then don’t get in.”

She scooted closer to the open door and grabbed the waist of my jeans, pulled me in close to the car. She yanked down my zipper, reached in, and pulled out my cock through the flap of my shorts.

“Holy shit,” I said again, mostly under my breath.

She already had my cock in her mouth, all of it because it was soft, and starting giving it a pulsing kind of sucking.

We didn’t say “freaked out” back in those days, but that’s what I was, looking toward the store, trying to see if someone was looking out into the parking lot and wondering why I was leaning up against the side of a car, because that’s how it would have appeared. She grabbed my hand and placed it on one of her breasts. It was gloriously heavy in my hand. I began kneading both while she sucked me. My cock grew in her mouth, despite my paranoia, and as it became fully erect, she began bobbing the length of it, fucking it with her mouth, running her lips along the shaft.

I’d had plenty of sex with Eleanor Kaminski that morning, and would have expected another orgasm so soon to be hard won. But the eroticism of the situation caused lust to rise like a sudden fever in me. Her big bare breasts were slippery from the sweat of my palms. My body was trembling from the nearness of my release, and I had to place my hands on the roof the car to steady myself.

“Oh, shit, you’re going to make me come,” I said. “You want it?”

“Um-hmm, um-hmm,” she hummed, rapidly fucking my prick with her mouth.

A fat raindrop pinged the hardtop. Then another. I clenched my ass, then released, and began pumping my semen into her mouth. I watched her; she stopped moving, holding the head of my pulsing cock between her lips, her eyes closed and brow furrowed in concentration as she swallowed.

When I’d finished, she let my softening cock drop from between her lips.

“Go,” she said, pulling up her tube top. I tucked myself back in and zipped up, backed away as she pulled the car door closed. I grabbed the shopping cart I’d come down that aisle to fetch, jogged it toward the line of others I’d already collected, rammed it in place, and wrangled the whole train of them toward the store, not looking back. The summer storm began in earnest just as I was maneuvering the whole contraption through the pneumatic doors. I was hit like a slap by the store’s weirdly chilled, vegetal-smelling air.

I was flushed, sweaty. My face felt like it was on fire, and I still trembling slightly. Sally turned sideways to look at me as she snapped open a paper sack. I took the register next to her and began bagging an order.

“Good thing you didn’t get caught,” she said.

“What? What do mean? I wasn’t—”

“In the rain” she smiled at me. “Good thing you didn’t get caught in that rain.”

“It felt pretty good, actually. It was kind of hot out there,” I said, wiping at my sweaty neck with the sleeve of my bagger’s jacket.

“Must have been,” she smiled.

I got a half hour dinner break because of the length of my shift. The Hillbilly made me take it at five-thirty, before the Mormon punched out and hurried off to whatever the fuck was so important that he’d had to beg me to cover for him. The bastard should have been rounding up carts during his last half hour but didn’t because it was still raining, so after my break I had to head outside and herd them all once again. I had to wear one of the cheap vinyl ponchos they kept for us for just such occasions, which kept off the rain but made you sweat like a monkey; there was no ventilation, it was a heat trap. Five minutes out the rain stopped, much to my relief. I was peeling off the poncho to throw it in one of the carts when Suzie Bowen’s car pulled up and parked next to me.

She leaned across the bench seat and pushed open the passenger door.

“Get in,” she said.

“Two minutes,” I said, slamming the car door. I didn’t want to get in, but I also didn’t want to be seen standing there at another open car door in the middle of the parking lot. Especially if I’d been seen at Eleanor Kaminski’s car earlier. And what was she doing here anyway? She never came by the store when I was working.

“I can’t have everyone wondering where I disappeared to when I’m on the clock. I thought you were supposed to be at a wedding? Where’s your mother?”

“She’s at the reception. I told her that I needed to make an emergency tampon run after we got there.” She was wearing something I’d never seen her in before, a pleated burgundy skirt overtop a burgundy leotard. I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath, but the leotard was skin tight, held her breasts snugly, and displayed a tasteful décolletage. She looked incredibly sexy, I had to admit, and I told her so.

“Thanks,” she said. “So, you really are working.”

“Yeah I’m— are you kidding? Is that why you came here, to check up on me? I gotta go.”

“Wait, no,” she grabbed my thigh. “No, that’s not why I stopped here.”

She slid her skirt up her bare thighs. The leotard she wore closed at the crotch with three snaps. She reached down and popped them, and the Spandex sprung away, exposing her pussy.

“I came here so you could fuck me,” she said, taking my hand and putting it between her legs. She was wet.

“What the hell?” I said. “Suze, I can’t fuck you. We’re in the middle a parking lot in broad daylight. I’ve gotta get back.”

“Just finger me. Just finger fuck me a little, that’s all. I just need your fingers in me. I feel sexy in this outfit and it made me really horny.”

She slouched down, sliding her ass forward in the seat. I looked around as I slipped my middle finger inside her.

“Uhhhh,” she moaned and shuddered. “That’s it.”

I knew I should have objected more strenuously, considering what had happened earlier in the day. But she looked so sexy, if slightly on the slutty side, that I couldn’t resist. I rarely saw her like that. The entire summer had been shorts and t-shirts, or her satiny peach robe (not that I had anything against her satiny peach robe). I brought my free hand to her breast, so perfectly molded in smooth, shiny fabric, and caressed it lightly. The air conditioning fought gamely against the steam that was rising from the combination of our excited breathing.

“This horny pussy is so fucking wet,” I said.

“Fuck it,” she grunted.

“Tight little cunt,” I whispered. “You’re such a slut, letting me finger you in broad daylight.”

“I am,” she breathed, her eyes closed, her hips moving rhythmically against my gently thrusting fingers. “I’m a horny slut with a… horny… cunt. Uhhhh…”

Even as I leaned in close to her, whispering to her and finger-fucking her, I kept one eye looking past her, toward the store.

“I need your cock,” she threw her head back. “I need it in my mouth. I need to suck your fucking cock.”

“Then you need to come,” I said. “You need to come all over my hand. Come for me. This slutty cunt needs to come for me. Then maybe I’ll shoot a nice, big load down your throat.”

That did it for her. She began bucking her hips, slamming the tops of her thighs so hard against the steering wheel I thought she might bruise them. I hoped that her car wasn’t bouncing along with her, but I couldn’t tell. She had one hand flattened against the driver’s side window and the other had my thigh in a death grip. Flyaway strands of hair clung to sweat on her neck.

As she wound down, I carefully removed my very wet fingers and brushed them on my jacket sleeve. She’d already moved her hand to the denim-covered lump between my legs.

“Take it out,” she breathed.

“Uh-uh,” I pulled back, opened the car door. “I gotta go back.”

“You’re serious? You don’t want—”

“Yeah, of course I do. Just can’t do it now. People are going to wonder where I am.

“Fuck,” she thumped back against the seat.

“Hey, I made you come,” I said. “It’s not like you got short-changed or anything.”

But I was tempted. Her chest fairly glistened with a powdery sheen. And the way her breasts looked in that leotard, the hint of cleavage at the scooped neck, I wanted to slip my hand in there and cup her tit, guide her head down to my lap. But Eleanor Kaminski had already coaxed three loads from me that day, the last one fairly recently, and even with Suzie Bowen’s evocative technique, I was afraid it would take too long. I was also uncertain about that taste of things down there given the events of the day; an unfamiliar essence might create a bit of controversy. I slid out of the car.

“You can take care of it later,” I said. “And you better dress up in that outfit again for me sometime.” She said something just as I was slamming the car door, but I didn’t hear it.

There were breaks in the kiting clouds and sunshine was making the blacktop steam. Suzie Bowen’s car stayed idling in the parking lot, shimmering in its waves of heat, while I finished gathering carts. She was still sitting there when I went inside.

Sally and I were both out front bagging groceries when Suzie Bowen came in. She strode into the cool of the A&P purposefully. I hadn’t noticed her shoes before. She was wearing some kind of platform sandal, and she was trying to walk in a way appropriate to them, not her typical loose, flat-footy amble. She looked tall and imperious, and even sexier than she had sitting in her car. Her pleated skirt swished back and forth across her tanned thighs, and her breasts bobbed just the slightest bit beneath the shiny Spandex leotard. She didn’t look at anyone, including me, but everyone working the front got a good look at her. She passed behind me and then Sally, walking the length of the checkout stations before turning and disappearing down an aisle.

When she was out of sight, I realized that Sally was watching me the whole time, a sort of creamy smile on her face. I furrowed my brow at her—a questioning look—but she just shrugged.

Suzie Bowen eventually reappeared and got in line behind the customer whose groceries I was packing. She was making me nervous. I was afraid she was up to something that was going to embarrass me. I wanted to move to another station but couldn’t; I had to finish the order I was bagging.

When I finished loading up the customer’s cart with groceries, Suzie Bowen’s purchases came down the belt: a L’eggs container of panty hose and a tube of cherry Chapstick. She plucked a bill from her little black clutch and paid. I put her items in a small sack, folded over the top, and held it out for her to take.

“Oh,” she said. “Could you help me load my groceries in my car?”

I just stood there holding the bag with, I imagined, a stupid look on my face. The checker looked at Suzie Bowen like she was nuts. Sally had slid over to the station next to me and was filling a sack as carefully as if she was building a house of cards, trying to do it without making a sound, still with that smile on her face.

“Uhh…” I said.

After a beat, Suzie Bowen shrugged, tucked her clutch under her arm, and took the bag.

“I guess I can manage,” she said, and sashayed out of the store as emphatically as she’d entered: long, swaying, runway model strides. The Hillbilly, smoking up in his cage, watched her the whole way.

“Well, that was interesting,” Sally said, sotto voce.

.:.

The rest of that long shift thankfully passed without incident, compromising or otherwise. Sally’s shift finished at 8; she punched out and left without saying goodbye, which I thought was odd. I was off in another part of the store cleaning up something, but usually she made a point of finding me to tell me she was leaving, offering me a cigarette. I went outside one final time for carts, the sky stretching above the parking lot a twilight mauve, and looked around for her car, but she was gone.

Thirty minutes later I clocked out as well, feeling spent from the long day, and wondering (to my surprise) if I even had the energy to visit Eleanor Kaminski again. But then I thought of her lolling on her bed, her naked, willing body beneath a thin, cool sheet, rucked and shadowed in the lampglow, her wavy mane spread luxuriously over her pillow; thought of tucking in next to her, fitting myself to her warm curves. I could find the energy.

But, it turned out, first there was something else. A note tucked beneath the wiper blade of my car instructed me to go to the loading dock behind the store. The handwriting was unfamiliar, so all I knew for sure was that the note wasn’t left by Suzie Bowen. Eleanor Kaminski could have left it, I imagined, to warn me off stopping by her house after all because of a change of circumstances. If that was case, the note could have just told me stay away. Unless she still wanted to have a go at it in her car since the house was off limits. I was less than enthused by that prospect. I had a feeling, and a hope, that it was something else entirely.

I drove around to the darkened rear of the store and my headlights swung over Sally’s pumpkin-colored Vega. The hatch was open and she was sitting in the back, swinging her legs and smoking a cigarette. I pulled in next to her and killed the engine, cut the lights.

It was quiet back there, and mostly empty except for a few “boulders.” Rags of clouds, dyed black with darkness, drifted across the night sky that glowed sickly, jaundiced, from the reflected lights of the Mahoning Valley. The half-dozen scattered boulders were mute, black presences, black as voids against their dimly lit background; each seemed more like an emptiness than a solidity, holes punched in this dimension.

“Hey, Joe College,” she said. “You came. Want a beer?”

She reached into the paper sack next to her and twisted a can of Stroh’s from its plastic six-pack ring, handed it to me. Shook her pack of Marlboro Lights at me a couple times until one slid partway out. I took that, too, and bent to the offered flame of her Bic.

“Did you know it was me?”

“I guessed,” I said. “Or hoped.”

“Really?” she said. “You weren’t hoping for the busty princess from earlier, needing help putting on her panty hose?”

“Come on,” I said.

“It’s too dark for me to be able to tell if you’re blushing.”

“I don’t think I’m blushing,” I said, though my face felt hot. “I thought it was strange that you left without saying goodbye. I mean, just because you usually do.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, but I wanted to make sure I had enough time to pick up a six-pack and get back here before you left. It was a long day for you. Thought you’d enjoy a beer.”

“Who sold you beer?” I said.

“I went over to Murt’s. But I can get beer practically anywhere around here.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” she said. “Look at me.” She was in her typical summer work uniform, a pair of jeans that were skin-tight at the top and ballooning out to bells at the bottom, a pale blue tube top, and a light brown sugar tan everywhere else. “You think the jamokes in these dive bars are going to turn me down? It’s Youngstown. Besides, they all need the business.”

She scooted over and I sat down next to her on the back of the Vega. We both drank and smoked in silence for a couple minutes.

“This is nice,” I said finally. “I felt just whipped when I finally left tonight, but now I actually feel pretty good.”

“Yeah, well. Beer,” said Sally.

“No, not just that,” I said. “These last few weeks, I feel like I’m always rushing somewhere.”

“You do seem pretty busy. So, where were you rushing to tonight?”

“I don’t know. I… I was supposed to meet up with someone. Not a date or anything, just… Anyway, there’s no fixed time, I get there when I get there. If I decide to do that.” I finished the beer and crushed the can in my fist.

Sally handed me another. As she lit a fresh cigarette from the coal of her last, she said “You’re a funny one, Joe College,” from the unoccupied side of her mouth.

“What do you mean?”

She flicked her finished butt out into the lot—it landed with a little valedictory spray of glowing orange—and blew a long plume of smoke that hung around us in the night air. That smell, that second-hand smoke in the summer night… you don’t smell that very often anymore, but on those rare occasions when I do these days, I am always instantly transported back to that exact moment.

“You’re nice,” she said, “and kinda cute, and you’re not a jerk. But there’s something mysterious about you.”

“I’m not mysterious.”

“Okay, maybe mysterious isn’t the right word.”

“I’m just private,” I said.

“Yep,” she said. “You’re that. But it’s like the niceness… I don’t know, hides something. Nothing bad, necessarily, but something… unexpected, maybe?”

“Maybe the niceness is just to hide that I really am a jerk,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Are you?” But she didn’t laugh about it.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I might be.” I didn’t laugh about it either. “Do jerks know that they’re jerks?”

“Not usually. But hey, that’s kind of a good sign. Your questioning it, I mean. Behaving like a jerk—I’m not saying that you are, ‘cuz of course I wouldn’t know—doesn’t mean someone is really a jerk. Sometimes people just… lose their way.”

She put her cigarette between her lips and held it there, leaned back on her arms. Her ankles were crossed and she was swinging her legs again. I looked at her then, thought about reaching for her, touching the bare plane of her stomach, of leaning in and kissing her, but didn’t. Her eyes, as best I could tell in the near-dark, were closed. Part of me couldn’t believe I was sitting there with her. She was as desirable to me at that moment as anyone I’d ever known. It was, suddenly, the happiest I’d ever felt.

“Why haven’t we done this before?” I said.

“Mmm,” she hummed. Then, “Well, this is a bit of a special occasion.”

“Why is it a special occasion?”

“I’ve never quit a job before. Never had a job before, either, so…”

“You’re quitting?”

“Quit. Today was my last day. I’m done.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope.”

“But why?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s just a grocery store.”

“But… what are you going to do?”

“I’ve got plans. Don’t you have plans?”

“Yeah, but…” I said.

“But what? Some slutty little hump like me can’t possibly have something better to do than bag groceries?”

“Hey, no, I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Well, that’s where your ‘but’ sounded like it was going.”

“No. You’re… I didn’t… Of course you have plans. Everybody has plans. You just never talk about anything like that.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “I’m private.”

We sat in simmering silence then. I felt deflated, embarrassed, and a little bit angry—the way people do when something shameful about them is exposed. The cheaters, the hypocrites… caught in their lies, they bare their teeth. Peevishly, I thought, I should just leave now. Go to Eleanor Kaminski’s and bang the shit out of her for a couple hours, then go home and fall into bed. But the idea struck me as sad, emptying. The emotional swing from what I’d felt just mere moments earlier—happy, content—was so violent, so sudden, that I began to cry.

“Hey,” said Sally, jumping up and getting in front of me. “Hey, College, hey…”

She put her skinny arms around me, squeezed me so tight I thought I might hear her bones snap, or mine. I felt her hard edges dig into me, wrist bones and elbows and hip bones; she was such a thin, sharp thing.

She pulled back and took my face in her hands, then wiped at my eyes and cheeks a bit.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Hey.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“Joe College,” she said, running her hand through my hair. “I’m a slutty little Youngstown hump who fucks forty-year-old married guys who say their wives don’t understand them. Or suck their dicks anymore. Then after they come, they run home to hug their kids and swear to themselves they’ll never do it again. It’s okay. We’ve all got our weak shit.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that’s what you do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Losing your way is a way of finding it. Hey.”

She was looking at me but I wasn’t looking at her. I didn’t want to; I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to think about her fucking forty-year-old guys or sucking their dicks; I didn’t want to think about anyone even touching her. I didn’t want to think about Suzie Bowen or Eleanor Kaminski or the fabric store or the A&P or college. She turned her head and looked off into the distance, or I thought so anyway, but it was really just a change of attention.

“What’s that smell?” she said.

We’d been haloed in cigarette smoke for most of the time. I hadn’t noticed anything, but now I caught a different, acrid odor.

“Something burning somewhere,” I said. I looked past her shoulder and saw that one of the cardboard bales was smoldering at its base.

“Must have been from your cigarette,” I said. I walked over at kicked at the spot from where smoke was uncoiling. My kick produced a spray of sparks. I keep at it a bit, but the burn had bitten into the thing.

“Do we have any beer left?” I said back to her. “We need to pour something on it, I think.”

“It’s gone,” she said. “We drank it.”

I kicked at it a while more, but that wasn’t going to put it out. I walked back to our cars.

“There’s not any water back here, I guess?” I said. We watched the bale continue to smolder.

“You know,” she sighed. “I think we better get out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said. I grabbed her hand. “Can we go somewhere else?”

She smiled, and pressed the hand I held to my face.

“No,” she said. “Not tonight.”

“But when? How will I see you again?”

She rose up on her toes and kissed my lips gently, lingeringly, before dropping back down.

“I’ll find you,” she said.

“Can you meet me here again?”

“We’ll see. Relax.”

“But I’m going to be leaving soon,” I said. “Going… you know. I don’t know when… I don’t know how often I’ll be back here. I don’t—”

She put her finger to my lips. “I’ll find you. Don’t worry.”

“How will you—”

“I said, don’t worry. You believe me, right?”

I looked back and thickening billows of smoke were swirling out of the smoldering cardboard cube. She pulled away from me and made for her car.

“You could be one of the good ones, Joe,” she called back at me.

 “Wait,” I called after her. “Sally! Hey!”

But she’d slammed her tinny car door and started her engine. Those back quarter panels, threadbare from rust, rattled like maracas. As she sped off, she tossed an empty beer can out her window that clanked forlornly in the emptied wake of her departure.

I had nothing left to do but get in my car and drive away. I hoped that the bale burned itself out, or at least didn’t spread itself in a way that brought fire to the decades-old A&P. It was practically an institution in those parts, after all.