Missing People

“Three Cups” by Susan L. Pollet

Multiple trips to the big store were not unusual for Simon. He had made his first trip before dinnertime, when he was dispatched for a can of coconut milk, which was needed for a recipe that Josie was making. Gluten-free and dairy free. She had found it on Pinterest and decided to give it a try. Simon’s job was to go get the groceries. That was always his job. He hated Pinterest.

It was on this late afternoon trip that he first saw the lady. The lady was big in stature, and wide. She sat sprawled out in one of those motorized carts the store offers for people who need them. She had hers parked on the sidewalk out front, down near the corner of the building. The basket portion was filled with plastic grocery bags, all stuffed with products, and a second entire cart stood next to her, also jammed with stuffed bags. Hundreds of dollars of groceries. She sat in the seat of the motorized cart and leaned over in such a way that she kept one of her hands on the edge of the second cart, presumably so it wouldn’t roll away. Simon had walked past her on his way in through the automatic doors and assumed she was waiting for a ride. She was still there later when he emerged with the coconut milk in a bag. As he passed her, he thought about the groceries in her bags, the balmy weather, and imagined her butter turning sour. 

“Do you need help with anything?” he asked.

“I’m all good. You’re so sweet,” she said.

Simon stood silently for a moment, not knowing what else to do, then nodded at her and headed for his car.

The recipe had been mostly a success, except that the gluten free noodles had sort of come apart during the cooking process, so the texture was more shipwreck than macaroni. But the nondairy cheese did a sufficient job and Simon had no complaints to share, not that he would if he did. There was enough left over that he just took the crockpot out of its warming base and placed it in the refrigerator to keep the food overnight. He and Josie were alone now, with one kid graduated and one in college, and it didn’t make much sense to run the dishwasher for just a few plates and glasses, so Simon filled up half the sink with warm water and dish soap and quickly gave everything a quick wash, carefully stacking the items next to the sink to dry.

He was doing the dishes when Middie, their youngest, called on FaceTime and talked with Josie for some ten minutes or so. She was coming home for the weekend to do some laundry and work on her homework without distractions.

“When’s she getting here?” Simon asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” Josie said. “Before lunchtime. She says she has a lot to get done.”

“Well, I guess I’d better get to the store then,” said Simon.

Josie nodded. “I’ll start a list.”

The reason he needed to return to the store was, from Middie’s perspective, the repeated complaint that there was “never any food in the house” when she came home for a visit. This, again, was due to Simon and Josie being on their own. Aside from the occasional Pinterest recipe, they otherwise didn’t keep too much in the house. Simon felt like he could do with just one meal a day if he had to. A baked potato would do it. Or a sandwich.

But with Middie coming home, the stakes changed. They would need plenty of options for breakfasts and lunches, plus a plan for dinners. They would need snacks, loads of snacks, and beverages, several kinds. They had to take their normally thrifty pantry and blast it with a firehose of foodstuffs. Cereals and chips and rolls and bagels and drinks and treats. Middie was coming home and nobody wanted to be yelled at about food.

For his part, Simon was handling the kids being gone more or less just fine. They tended to keep in touch with him as they wrestled with the new challenges of living on their own, getting advice on paying bills or occasionally asking for some funds to help them out. These conversations were mostly transactional, which is why he never thought to pass the caller on to Josie for a catch-up after he spoke with them, something Josie had asked him to do by making an official behavior change request, or BCR. 

BCRs had been part of the marriage for four and one-half years. They arose as a strategy during a span of counselling Simon and Josie attended that coincided with the kids heading off to college. Simon found the therapy a bit long-spoken, but probably useful. Josie’s first BCR was that he stopped saying “Mmm” when she told him something, and that he reply instead with actual words. Subsequent BCRs addressed how frequently he check-in with her while he was at work (at least once a day), arriving home from work at a consistent time (by 5:30, unless he called), showing affection to her in public (he should), and also how the towels were folded. He had never submitted a BCR himself, but one day, he knew, he probably would, and it would be a doozy when it came.

While Simon strove to comply with the BCRs, Josie was wracked with grief that the kids were gone. She had stayed home as they grew, she’d seemed more emotionally in touch with the kids as little ones than Simon had ever been, and even though she was working again now, their absence from the house weighed heavily on her.

“Why don’t you just say ‘Here’s Mom’ and hand me the phone?” she would ask Simon.

“I’m sorry,” Simon would say. “They were just asking about this or that, and then I let them go.”

Simon wished he could miss the kids like Josie did: thoroughly and up front, missing like yearning, bubbling to the surface. But he did not miss them in this way. He didn’t think he had ever missed anyone in this way, not even his parents, both passed, or his family of origin, living a few hundred miles away. Missing people was an intellectual exercise for Simon, especially if he could keep himself busy with his work, which he often did, because that’s what he had always done, especially during those years that the kiddos were at home with Josie and he was at the office. Pants and shoes had to be bought, after all. Classes signed up for and dogs fed.

The grocery list Josie made was significant, filled with all sorts of good snacks and treats that Simon looked forward to buying. Josie would write the list in such a way that the items would be organized by their location in the store, and Simon took it as a point of pride if he could minimize his cart-pushing-around to the very essential route needed to collect everything on the list. Invariably, there’d be a late-addition item, written in the margin or somewhere near the bottom, that he wouldn’t see until it was too late, and he’d have to backtrack across half the store to get it. 

It was early evening, the sun just beginning to set, when Simon parked in the same row on this second trip to the store, noting as he pulled through the lot that the lady was still camped out near the corner of the building, still seated in the motorized cart, and still holding on to the second cart with one hand. He hoped her butter wouldn’t spoil.

The shopping took more than an hour to complete, and included three separate backtrack incidents which ultimately killed Simon’s cart path efficiency. He had a nearly full cart, and chose to wait in line for a human checkout person, instead of trying to get it all done himself at the self-checkout. The self checkout was fine when you only had a couple of things, but for big hauls like this, when one of the kids was coming home, you needed the human cashier.

It was dark out when Simon finally emerged from the store and rolled past the still-waiting lady and piled his bags in his car. Then he walked his empty cart back to the cart corral and was heading back to his car when he stopped, pivoted and walked over to the lady.

“Hey I’ve noticed you’ve been sitting here for a while,” he said. “Do you need some help or a ride or something?”

“I’m homeless,” she said. “But it’s OK. I’m working with the Lieutenant Governor’s office to sort out some housing for me.”

Simon let this pass, but only with great effort. “Is someone coming to get you? You’ve been here a while.”

“Yeah, yeah, I have family,” she said. “I took the bus here, but they’ll come get me, I’m sure.”

“Where are you staying? Where are you taking all these groceries?”

“Oh, I’ve got family around for sure. And the Lieutenant Governor's office is helping me find housing.”

“The Lieutenant Governor is helping you find housing?” Simon asked. “Like, tonight?”

“No, no. I've been working with the Lieutenant Governor’s office. They’re going to get it all straightened out.”

“They are?”

“That’s what they told me,” she said.

Simon paused for a moment.

“I’m worried your groceries will go bad.”

“I’ve got plenty of family who will come. Plus the Lieutenant Governor.”

“Do you need to use my phone?” Simon asked.

“Oh, they know all about it,” she said. “They know all about it.”

Simon thought through what to do next. Should he offer to take her to his home? Load her groceries into the garage fridge? Give her a place to stay? Somehow explain all of this to Josie?

This idea, he rejected. Even if he could explain it to Josie, he sensed it would be one of those things that just doesn’t die down over time, that it’d rise up in future arguments, or rear its head in passing comments, add fuel to another BCR.

“I don’t know how to help you,” he said finally.

“I’m OK, sir, really,” the lady said. “Everything will be all right.”

Simon shrugged again and headed to his car and drove home, thinking of the woman and her two carts of groceries, her odd faith in the Lieutenant Governor. It took him two trips to bring in the grocery bags, looping five and six bag handles on each hand and lifting them out of the back like the Hulk. Josie came down from the upstairs where she had been seeing to Middie’s room.

“Three poops,” she said. 

Petey the dog liked to sneak upstairs to poop. Simon and Josie rarely had to go upstairs when the kids weren’t home, so the turds could add up. He cast Petey a sidelong glance. There’s a behavior change request he’d like to submit, to Petey, the rescue dog who couldn’t be housebroken. And he knows it’s wrong, pooping in the house, Simon thought, or else why would he sneak off to do it? 

“Can you clean them up?” Josie asked.

“Weren’t you just up there?” Simon said.

“I changed the sheets,” she said.

“And you just saved the poops for me?”

“I did.”

“But he’s your dog.”

Josie shrugged. Her mood had lifted. Middie was coming home for a visit. There was food in the house and clean sheets on her bed. Things were looking up, and she hummed a little tune to herself while she helped Simon find places in the pantry for all of the snacks he had bought. As they were finishing this job, Josie took one of the empty plastic bags and started putting all of the other plastic bags into it. It bulged out, ball shaped, holding probably fifteen or twenty plastic bags in itself. She walked over to the small recycling bin that was on the floor at the end of the counter. The bin itself was full of cardboard packaging and empty cans and plastic bottles. Josie took the plastic grocery bag and balanced it on the top of the recyclables.

Simon watched incredulously. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He thought of the woman at the store, her cartfuls of bags, her spoiling butter. Then he turned his back to Josie, looked up to the ceiling and slowly said, “You can’t put plastic bags in the recycling.”

This was true. Plastic grocery bags had to be kept separately and recycled at the store itself, and not put in the bin that they rolled out to the curb on garbage day. This had been true for the ten years they had lived in this house, and for the fifteen years they had lived in the house before this one. Simon sometimes imagined it as a quotation on his gravestone.

“I’m just setting them there for now,” Josie said.

“You’re never just setting them there for now,” Simon said. “You’ll just leave them there.”

“You need one to pick up the poop,” Josie said.

Simon didn’t know what to say. 

He felt that he couldn’t speak at all. 

Of all the things he knew about Josie from being married to her for thirty-one years, one was that she would always put plastic bags in the recycling. He doubted even a BCR would help, though he realized he had never tried one. He felt the longing welling up inside him, rolling to the tip of his tongue.

But he held back. The words would certainly fail when pitted against Josie, as certainly as Petey would never be housebroken, groceries would be bought in plastic bags, the upstairs of the house would sit empty, and no one would come for the woman at the store. 

“I don’t know how to help you,” Simon said finally, again looking up at the ceiling.

Josie didn’t respond. The words hung in the air above the kitchen for a moment before they broke apart and drifted away. Josie started humming again. Middie would be home in the morning.

About the author

Peter Ward Brown is a writer living in Central Ohio. He has been previously published by McSweeney’s and History Through Fiction, and has won Associated Press and Society for Professional Journalism awards for sports and human interest writing. He was the writer of the documentary films Landis: Just Watch Me and Let Them Play: A Triathlon Across America, as well as for two seasons of the Xbox 360 video game Kinect NatGeo TV.

about the artist

Susan L. Pollet is a visual artist and author whose works have appeared in multiple art shows and literary publications. She studied at the New York Art Students League, has been a member since 2018, and resides in NYC. For more, see susanpollet.substack.com.