Safeway

Toothpaste, toilet paper, box of spaghetti, marinara sauce, and two cups of ramen noodles brought the total number of items for the day to three hundred seventy, so Maya tapped the side of the register with her finger. Every zero required a tap; that was one of the rules. 

Peanut butter, loaf of bread, three frozen dinners, vanilla yogurt, batteries, coffee, and two energy bars made three hundred eighty. Tap. 

Two oranges, a cantaloupe, three tomatoes, a head of lettuce, two green peppers, and a bag of carrots made three hundred ninety. Tap. 

“Did you find everything you need?” Maya asked. 

The customer, a trim, fortyish woman in a business suit, ignored her as she composed a text on her phone. Maya didn’t mind. Silence made it easier to concentrate. At the next zero, she tapped the register four times, one for each hundred. That was another rule. 

“Have a nice day,” she said, handing the woman her receipt. 

Next was an older man in beat-up khaki shorts and a T-shirt. Maya got a lot of those. After Safeway added self-checkout machines, most of the store’s customers switched to scanning their own groceries. The few who still used the full-service line were either middle-aged and too frazzled to perform the simple task for themselves or retirees—men, usually—who just wanted someone to talk to. 

“Wet one out there,” the man said. “My dog wouldn’t even go outside.” 

Maya nodded as he predicted rain for tomorrow as well and murmured “hmm,” “uh-huh,” or some other filler that she could insert without thinking each time he paused. She could tune out weather conversations almost as easily as silence. Band-Aids, cottage cheese, butter, creamer, eggs. Tap. Four cans of soup, a liter of Coke, two bags of potato chips, cereal, a box of cookies, beef jerky. Tap. 

“And the wind,” he said. 

“I know,” Maya said. 

He probably hadn’t noticed the tapping. At least, Maya didn’t think so. Or if he had, she hoped he thought nothing of it—just the kind of thing that might happen by accident when someone’s hands were moving as rapidly as Maya’s. Still, she took precautions. Like a magician, she flourished her left hand—the one that did the scanning—while tapping the register discreetly with her right. It was essential that the taps remain undetected; this was the most important rule of all. The tapping would lose its power if someone called attention to it. 

She bagged the man’s groceries while repeating the day’s total in her head—four hundred twenty-seven, four hundred twenty-seven—so she wouldn’t forget. 

“Enjoy the rest of your day,” she said. 

Head down, she moved on to the next customer’s items. Taco shells, refried beans, and a jar of salsa brought her to four hundred thirty. Another zero. Another moment of reckoning. Zeroes maintained the cosmic order, balanced yin and yang, equalized the scales. But they had to be acknowledged—tap—or . . .  Maya didn’t want to think about it. She picked up a ketchup bottle and ran it across the scanner. 

“Maya? Is that you?” 

Maya knew that voice. She looked up, mentally noting four hundred thirty-three. The bottle slipped from her hand. 

“Mrs. Wilkes!” she said. “Hi!” 

Cindy Wilkes, Kelly’s mother. Kelly had been Maya’s best friend through eighth grade, until school boundary lines separated them into different high schools and they drifted apart. But when they were younger, they spent every weekday afternoon at each other’s homes, plus sleepovers on the weekends, and Maya came to think of Mrs. Wilkes as her second mom. When Maya broke her arm sledding into a tree, it was Mrs. Wilkes who carried her into their minivan, drove her to the hospital, and caressed her forehead in the emergency room until Maya’s parents arrived. Her hair was grayer than the last time Maya had seen her—was it five years ago now?—but her roundish face and warm smile hadn’t changed. 

“It’s so nice to see you,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “How long have you . . .” Her voice trailed off as she motioned awkwardly toward the register. 

“Six months,” Maya said. Mrs. Wilkes tilted her head at an angle; Maya assumed she was doing the math. Six months meant November, which meant Maya hadn’t completed her fall semester, maybe hadn’t even begun her fall semester, but either way had definitely dropped out of college. “I’m taking some time off,” she said. 

Mrs. Wilkes waited for Maya to say more, then smiled and said, “Good for you.” 

Maya retrieved the ketchup bottle, gave it a push, and watched it slide down the metal incline that ended in the bagging area. As fondly as she remembered Mrs. Wilkes, she couldn’t tell her the real story. Mrs. Wilkes wouldn’t believe her anyway. No one would. Her parents, her brother, her friends, her therapist—they’d all say the same thing. The school was five hundred miles away. They caught the shooter in the act. You didn’t have anything to do with it. But Maya knew better. So what if she couldn’t prove it was her fault? They couldn’t prove it wasn’t, either. 

“How are your parents?” Mrs. Wilkes asked. 

Maya’s mom: sad, confused, watching her constantly for signs of another breakdown. Maya’s dad: angry at first over the lost tuition, now frustrated that he couldn’t do anything to fix her. Both of them: increasingly worried that Maya was settling in too comfortably to her hourly job as a service employee and might never finish her degree. But Maya couldn’t blame them. If she had a dean’s list daughter who suddenly dropped out of college and moved back home—for who knew how long—she would have felt the same way. 

“They’re good,” Maya said. “The same.” 

Maya scanned a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, then a bottle of detergent—and froze. She’d forgotten to count the ice cream. She’d almost jumped right over it and assigned its number—four hundred forty-six—to the detergent instead. Her heart began racing. Skipping the ice cream would throw off everything. Every zero, every tap would come one too late, not just for Mrs. Wilkes’s groceries but for every item to follow, for the rest of the day. This frightened her. Carrying on a real conversation, one that demanded her attention, was making her sloppy. When she got sloppy, she miscounted, and innocent people could die. Again. 

“Tell them I said hi,” Mrs. Wilkes said. 

Maya barely heard her. Her mind had returned to college, a year ago. She had different rules back then, one of which was that every trip between the same two locations on campus had to take the same number of steps. For example, from her dorm room to Spanish class was eight hundred thirty-three. That’s how many steps it took her the first time she walked that distance, so from then on she had to match that number. She didn’t know why, just that something terrible would happen if she didn’t. Some mornings, if her stride was a little longer than usual, she had to take baby steps before entering the classroom. Other mornings, giant steps. But she never missed her target. Until April 19. 

There was a boy she liked. Matt Corcoran. He was awful at Spanish, so bad that it became the running joke in the class. On the rare occasions that he answered a question correctly, or close enough, everyone applauded him, even the professor. On Wednesday, April 19, Matt happened to be walking through the quad at the same time as Maya. He said hi. She said hi. He had beautiful hands. She wondered how they would feel around her waist. She didn’t spend long thinking about it, only a few seconds, but long enough to stop counting her steps. She hoped it wouldn’t matter. She promised herself that she’d do better tomorrow, and every day after that. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? Maybe losing count was a good thing. It was a stupid rule anyway, and maybe now she could finally free herself of it. If a cute boy wanted to talk to her on her way to Spanish, shouldn’t she be allowed to enjoy it without feeling guilty? 

Her phone buzzed silently in the middle of class; the professor had been teaching them about conditional endings. Maya checked the notification: twenty-six people shot dead at a Milwaukee elementary school, twenty-three of them students. 

Maya’s roommate found her on their dorm room floor that afternoon, curled up in a ball and weeping. Her parents picked her up two days later and drove her home. A weekend of rest and comfort food—that’s all she needed, they hoped. But days turned into weeks, and when her dad returned to campus, it was to pack up his car with her belongings. 

Working at Safeway had been her therapist’s idea—a way to get her out of the house and interacting with people again, something simple that she could forget about as soon as her shift ended. So much for that, Maya thought now. Checking out groceries turned out to be the most stressful job she could possibly have imagined. 

“And Brian?” Mrs. Wilkes asked. “He’s a junior now, right?” 

“Yes,” Maya said, then added pointlessly: “Almost a senior.” 

She tapped the register to mark four hundred eighty, then stole a glance at Mrs. Wilkes to gauge whether she had noticed. Maya doubted it; Mrs. Wilkes had been pulling groceries out of her cart and placing them on the conveyor belt, so her eyes were directed elsewhere. But her smile was gone, and no wonder. Not so long ago, she had cared for Maya almost as if she were her own daughter, and now Maya was treating her like a stranger. 

“How’s Kelly?” she asked, as cheerfully as she could manage. “Does she like Ohio State?” 

Maya watched Mrs. Wilkes’ entire body relax, as if she were thinking: This is the Maya I remember, or at least traces of her. “She’s studying in Madrid this semester,” Mrs. Wilkes said. Then she laughed. “At least, I hope she’s studying.” 

“Wow,” Maya said. “Madrid. That must be great.” 

Mrs. Wilkes gushed about her daughter’s many amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experiences: cooking classes, flamenco, a bullfight. She was proud of Kelly, Maya thought, and rightfully so. People like Kelly—nice people, with no blood on their hands—deserved good things that came their way. 

But the longer Mrs. Wilkes continued—Kelly had just visited Barcelona—the more Maya regretted asking the question. Maya, too, had gotten what she deserved. A year ago, she’d wanted to practice environmental law. Instead, she was spending thirty-two hours a week scanning single-use plastic water bottles in a job that probably wouldn’t even exist a year from now. The self-service machines had already replaced most of the humans who used to perform this work; soon they would take over completely. But if she quit, who would do the counting? Who would mark the zeroes? Who would protect the children? 

No, Maya thought. As long as Safeway continued to pay her, she could never leave this job. She had to perform her penance. She owed it to those twenty-three little kids. 

Two final items—a container of yogurt and a package of cheese—and Mrs. Wilkes’s cart was empty at last. Four hundred ninety-two, four hundred ninety-two, Maya repeated to herself. She began sorting the groceries into bags, heaviest items on the bottom, fruit on the top, smaller items wherever she could find a gap. She didn’t mind this part of the job. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, and it helped her focus on something other than Kelly’s adventures. 

But then Mrs. Wilkes abruptly ended her monologue. Maya looked at her. When she resumed speaking, her voice was different. “You and Kelly,” she said. Her eyes were glistening; she seemed on the verge of tears. She laughed, embarrassed at herself. “I’m sorry. So many memories of you girls. I miss those years.” 

Maya felt her own eyes water. “I miss them, too,” she said. And she meant it. How many times had Mrs. Wilkes cooked her dinner? Or driven her to the mall? Or cheered her on at swim meets? Those were the things she wished she had counted, not the number of steps to Spanish or this unending parade of groceries. 

She picked up the Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and searched for a pint-shaped gap in one of the bags where it would fit. Then a terrible thought occurred to her. Earlier, when she’d almost forgotten to count the ice cream, maybe her mind had played a trick on her. Maybe she hadn’t initially skipped over it at all. Maybe she’d counted it once, thought she’d forgotten about it, and then counted it again. 

Still holding the ice cream, she replayed the moment in her head. She’d picked up the pint, scanned it, realized that she hadn’t counted it, paused, then corrected herself and counted it. Four hundred forty-six. Surely that was what had happened. 

But she’d been distracted. Mrs. Wilkes had just asked her about her parents. She might have double counted. It was possible. 

Mrs. Wilkes’s voice broke through her thoughts. “Maya, are you okay?” 

Maya didn’t answer. If she’d double counted, then the ice cream had brought the total for the day to four hundred forty-five, not four hundred forty-six. Which meant she wasn’t now at four hundred ninety-two, but four hundred ninety-one. Everything was off by one. All the zeroes: wrong. All her taps: wrong. 

“Maya?” Mrs. Wilkes asked again. 

Maya tried to slow her breathing; she could feel herself starting to panic. If she subtracted by one now, she could get back on track—unless she’d been counting correctly all along. Then all the taps would be off in the opposite direction. 

There was only one way to know for sure. She had filled three grocery bags so far. She cleared a space in the bagging area, pushing all the unbagged items off to one side. Then she grabbed one of the full bags and tipped it over, so the items spilled out. She moved deliberately. There was no need for alarm. She would simply recount the items. When she’d finished with the old man, she’d been at four hundred twenty-seven. She’d start from there, and go one by one. Either she’d land on four hundred ninety-one or four hundred ninety-two. Simple. She could do this. No one had to die. 

“Maya,” Mrs. Wilkes said, more urgently this time. “What are you doing?” 

Maya counted three items, rebagged them, and tapped the register. Four hundred thirty. “I think I overcharged you,” she said. 

The customer behind Mrs. Wilkes—a mother with a full cart and a young boy and girl in tow—realized that something was amiss. “What’s going on?” she asked. 

Six more items made four hundred thirty-six. Four more brought the total to another zero. Tap. “This will only take a minute,” Maya said. 

“I’m in a hurry,” the woman said. Her daughter banged her fists on the conveyor belt; the boy shoved her, and the girl started to cry. 

Maya ignored them. The less she spoke, the faster she could count. She was up to four hundred fifty-three and had refilled the first grocery bag. She moved it aside and emptied another one. But before she could count any more items, she heard a new voice. A man. Maya turned around to face Mr. Schaeffler, the assistant manager. She liked him well enough, most days. Sometimes she caught him staring at her longer than he should for someone more than twice her age, but he was generally nice to her. Now, though, his expression was stern. 

“Is there a problem here?” he asked. 

“Everything’s fine,” Maya said. She gestured to Mrs. Wilkes. “I accidentally overcharged this customer, but I’m taking care of it.” 

The mother maneuvered herself in front of her cart so she was standing next to Mrs. Wilkes, facing Mr. Schaeffler. “I don’t have time for this,” she said. “She already bagged this woman’s groceries and now she’s dumped them out again.” 

“Because I made a mistake,” Maya said. 

“Why don’t I just go ahead and pay,” Mrs. Wilkes interjected. She spoke calmly and smiled at Mr. Schaeffler. “I was watching her the whole time, and she rang me up perfectly.” 

“If she overcharged you—” 

“She didn’t,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “She was very thorough and courteous. She’s a lovely employee.” Mr. Schaeffler looked at Maya dubiously, then back at Mrs. Wilkes. “I insist,” Mrs. Wilkes continued. “If we could just put everything back in the bags, I’ll be on my way.” 

“If you’re sure,” Mr. Schaeffler said. Mrs. Wilkes nodded. “Then let me help,” he said, picking up a frozen lasagna and placing it in one of the bags. He leaned over to reach for a can of peas but Maya snatched it before he could take it. 

“I should do it,” she said. 

Mr. Schaeffler straightened. “Maya,” he said in a low voice, enunciating her name precisely. “This customer needs her groceries so she can go about her day. So I’m going to help. Is that clear?” 

Maya felt her skin turn hot. There was no way she could recount the items if Mr. Schaeffler were filling the bags, too. She’d have to count his groceries at the same time she was counting hers. No one could do that. “But it’s my job,” she said. 

The mother exhaled loudly. “Can someone please give this woman her groceries?” 

“Back off,” Maya snapped. “I’m moving as fast as I can.” 

The woman gasped. Her boy pointed at Maya and said, “That’s not very nice.” 

Maya put her hand over her mouth, horrified at the words that had just escaped her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. I just—” 

Mr. Schaeffler smacked his palm against the metal surface of the bagging area. “That’s enough!” he said. He pointed at Maya and motioned for her to step away from the register. “Out.” 

Maya tried to process what he was saying. It didn’t make sense. She still hadn’t figured out whether she was at four hundred ninety-one or four hundred ninety-two.  

“Now!” Mr. Schaeffler commanded. 

The next thing Maya knew, she was standing on the other side of the bagging area. She couldn’t remember how she got there, but there she was, watching Mr. Schaeffler repack Mrs. Wilkes’s groceries. Her breaths quickened and her head felt strange. The outlines of the individual items seemed to blur together into an ill-shapen mass. 

“Please,” she begged. “You don’t understand.” 

The names of the twenty-three children came back to her now, in alphabetical order, the way she’d memorized them: Emma Alston, age 7; Bill Booth, age 8; Lily DeSoto, age 8 . . .  

She had failed them a year ago, and she had failed them again today. How many more families would bury their children because she couldn’t even count a few groceries? She began sobbing, and her knees buckled. 

Then she felt someone put their arms wrap around her, holding her close. 

“It’s okay,” Mrs. Wilkes said. “I’ve got you.” 

Maya had grown taller than Mrs. Wilkes in the years since she left middle school, but she leaned against her and buried her head against her neck. “It’s all my fault,” she said. “If I hadn’t—” 

“Shush,” Mrs. Wilkes said. She whispered in Maya’s ear: “It’s going to be okay, I promise. Just breathe . . .  breathe . . . . nice and slow. Everything will be all right.” 

Maya didn’t believe her. Nothing was going to be okay. She’d dropped out of college, she’d probably lost her job, and another tragedy was about to strike—it might already have happened—all because of her. But she was tired, so very tired. There were so many numbers to count, everywhere around her, stretching into infinity. She would never keep up with them. She closed her eyes and allowed Mrs. Wilkes to rock her from side to side. She breathed deeply, slowly, just as Mrs. Wilkes instructed. Soon she was no longer weeping, and her dizziness eased. She should compose herself, she thought, apologize to the mother and Mr. Schaeffler, then leave and never come back. But not yet. A few moments more, then she’d face the consequences of her actions. 

She felt Mrs. Wilkes’ hand stroke the back of her head, and Maya remembered again when she broke her arm, the two of them huddled together on gray plastic chairs in the emergency room. Maya’s arm had stopped hurting long before she got to the hospital; she felt only a numbness. But Mrs. Wilkes held her anyway, comforting her, just as she was doing now. 

“Tell me what to do,” Maya said, her head still resting on the older woman. “Please?” 

“Just breathe,” Mrs. Wilkes whispered. “We’ll talk about it later.” She caressed Maya’s head again, smoothing her hair against her neck. 

That made two, Maya thought. Two caresses. 

Another made three. Two more brought the total to five. When she counted to ten, she tapped Mrs. Wilkes lightly on the arm with her right hand. 

ERIK FATEMI

Erik Fatemi lives in Arlington, Virginia, where he lobbies the federal government on behalf of nonprofit health groups. His fiction has appeared in JMWW, Identity Theory, After Dinner Conversation, and WWPH Writes. Find him on X @ErikFatemi.