Five Days Left (12 page)

“Thank you. I’m Mara Nichols, by the way.”

“Pleased ta meet ya, Mrs. Nichols.”

She laughed. “I can’t imagine. So far I’ve done little more than glare and hiss at you.”

He led her out of the house and down the walk. “I’ve got a feelin’ there’s more to ya than glare an’ hiss,” he said. He was silent for a bit. When he spoke again, he tilted his head away from her slightly, as though preparing for her to smack him. “I get the feelin’ maybe you’re used ta bein’ in control. Not all that keen on . . .” He hesitated, looking nervous again. “Help,” he said finally.

Mara threw her head back in a loud laugh. The sudden movement caused her to tip backward, and Harry took a quick step to the right, behind her, catching her against him. He gently pushed her upright and took his place at her side again, casting his attention intently in every direction but hers. She looked gratefully at his profile but he wouldn’t look at her, so she nudged him in the side until he finally turned his head toward her. She flashed him a conspiratorial smile and laughed again, and this time he laughed with her, a low, rumbling chuckle that she sensed he cut short on purpose.

As he called in his status to the dispatcher, Mara looked around the interior of the cab. She had been too upset on Monday to notice that, unlike the overworn appearance of its operator, the car itself was pristine. The seats and floor were spotless, and the various piles of maps, receipt books and business cards on the console were each bundled together neatly, fastened by black binder clips. A small cooler sat on the passenger side floor in front—his lunch, she guessed—and a neatly folded jacket lay on the seat.

His sun visor was down and in the bottom right corner was a small, faded and slightly creased picture. Mara leaned forward to get a closer look. It was a school photo of a young girl not much older than Laks. She sat primly as kids in school photos do, shoulders straight, hands clasped together in her lap, a small, slightly forced smile on her face.

“Granddaughter?” she asked.

But even as she asked it, she knew the answer was no. The photo was too old, the girl’s hairstyle and clothes too dated. The photo must be ten
years old at least, making the girl a teenager now, or older. Mara studied Harry’s profile and tried to estimate his age. Mid-fifties at the most. He had the look of someone who had lived a tough life, but he didn’t appear old enough to have a granddaughter who was now a teenager.

Harry looked up from the notes he was making in his driver’s log. “What’s that?”

“I was asking about the photo on your visor. Is that your granddaughter or . . . ?”

“Oh. Uh. No.” He shot a hand to the visor and snapped it shut, concealing the girl. Mara was about to apologize for upsetting him when he turned and smiled. “So. Errands, ya said on the phone. Where to first?”

He pressed the button to start the meter. He wasn’t upset, then. But there would be no more discussion about the photo.

“Pharmacy,” Mara said. “Then there’s a clothing store a few blocks from there. I’ve already called ahead and they’re holding some things for me. I have to try them on but it shouldn’t take long.”

He nodded and pulled away from the curb.

Mara

Mara told herself this was no big deal, people bought these things all the time. The cashier wouldn’t think twice, other shoppers wouldn’t even notice. It was no more embarrassing than buying tampons, which she used to bury under a dozen bottles of lotion, shampoo and sunscreen when she was a teenager but now had no problem carrying in plain sight through a crowded store. The same way she’d seen middle-aged men standing unapologetically in line, a tube of hemorrhoid cream in hand. Nothing to it.

Harry had offered to go into the pharmacy with her. Carry the basket while she shopped, tote the bags out to the car, but she told him she didn’t want to trouble him. It wouldn’t have been any trouble, she knew, but he backed off. He must have sensed she wanted to be alone.

Inside, she grabbed a handbasket from the stack near the door and took a confident step toward the aisle marked “Walkers/Adult Undergarments/Misc. Aids.” It was a generous phrase, she thought: “Adult undergarments.” She would never be able to think of them as anything but diapers.

And that did it: diapers.

She was forty-two, and she was buying diapers.

Not the cute kind with little yellow ducks on the cloth that signaled
a perfectly normal phase of life, but large, ugly pieces of cloth that screamed, “I can no longer control my bladder any better than an infant.” And though the write-ups on the Internet swore the new designs were discreet, some even stitched in pretty patterns to look less like the exact thing they were, there was no getting past the big, bulky, plastic packaging that alerted everyone in the store that the purchaser was “having difficulties,” like the Internet ads said. Incontinent, like everyone would think.

Her second step wasn’t confident. It wasn’t a quick walk from door to aisle to cashier anymore, but a treacherous journey to the end of a plank and into the perilous waters of the diseased, the decrepit. She was a failure. Her body had failed her, and the fact that this was happening in her forties instead of her eighties made her failure that much more pathetic. She felt like a thirteen-year-old boy buying condoms, a fourteen-year-old girl buying a pregnancy test. There was an age range in which certain drugstore purchases were innocent, unremarkable. Outside that range, the same purchases were despicable, suspicious.

Humiliating.

Mara felt her skin warm from her collarbone to her chin as she made her walk of shame to the aisle. When she reached it, she did a slow circle, looking in 360 degrees to make sure no one was following. Watching. Noticing. No one was, and she took a breath and told herself to act now, while she had a narrow window of privacy. Move quickly down the aisle, she heard her voice sound in her head. Grab two packages, race to the cashier, make the purchase, run for the cover of the cab. Do it fast and maybe it won’t be so bad. Three . . . two . . . one: rip off the Band-Aid.

But she couldn’t make her feet move down the aisle. And while she stood, shoes cemented to the linoleum, she concocted a new theory: if she refused to walk the remaining steps, refused to touch the packages, maybe the problem would simply go away.

She had started down that course that morning, though, before
deciding it was too risky. Standing in the bathroom, a maxi pad in her hand, she had convinced herself if she didn’t wear it, if she didn’t concede there was a reason to guard against another accident, then one wouldn’t occur. Preparing for it was tantamount to inviting it to happen. She tossed the pad back into the box, which she then pushed into the deep recesses of the cupboard.

But minutes later, when she was pulling on her freshly laundered yoga pants, she saw the boy from the grocery store in her mind, the surprised “O” of his mouth as he stared at the stains on her pants, and she stammered and stuttered and tried to explain that there was a reasonable explanation for why she was standing in a public place, covered in pee stains and shrouded in the revolting stench of urine. She marched back into the bathroom, retrieved the box and put on a pad, praying it would do the trick until she made it to the pharmacy for the real thing.

Stalling for time, Mara glanced left and right, in front and behind, another check to make sure no other shoppers were nearby. An end-cap display offered a stack of Dallas Cowboys beach towels, and although in her twenty-plus years as a Texan she had never cared one lick about football, she decided that now was the time for her to own some local team merchandise. Holding up one towel, then another, she debated the merits of blue background with white helmet versus the opposite, ignoring the snide voice in her head that said for $4.99 per, she needed to just buy both damn designs and go about the business she had come in the store to conduct.

She heard a man’s voice in the next aisle over and remembered Harry. If she delayed any longer, his southern gentility would demand he come in and find her, make sure she was all right. She put two towels in her basket and faced the aisle, warily eyeing the shelves halfway down. She had chosen a brand last night after doing some Internet research and now she narrowed her eyes and inspected the packages until she spotted the one from the website.

She shot another furtive look in each direction. All clear. Taking a
deep breath, she clamped her mouth closed and walked as fast as she could down the aisle. Without a break in her forward motion and without breathing, she snapped an arm out sideways, snatched two packages from the shelf, crammed them into her basket under the towels and kept up her pace to the end of the aisle. Only when she had rounded the corner into “Household Items/Paper Products” did she open her mouth, letting the trapped air out in a rush before doubling over and sucking in a deep breath, then another, and another.

When she recovered, she stood upright, gazed at the square shapes pushing out from under the towels and let the edges of her lips rise ever so slightly. Done. She had done it.

She was about to let herself smile fully when a woman appeared at her elbow from nowhere. Quickly, Mara spun away, swinging the basket to the other side of her body and out of the woman’s sight, pretending to examine the laundry detergent options in front of her while she waited for the woman to make her way past. The woman slowly moved out of the aisle and Mara, smiling broadly now with relief, headed to the front door of the store and the waiting safety of the cab.

And then she remembered she had to pay.

Goddamn it. How could she have forgotten that? And now she was walking the plank again, or down the long green hallway to the execution chamber, or along the Trail of Tears or whatever other passage of misery man had traveled before her. She stepped reluctantly toward the register and prepared to reveal the contents of her basket to the twenty-something clerk whose mouth would surely form the same horrified “O” Mara had seen in the grocery store on Monday.

She eyed the cashier closely, and taking in the blue streak in the girl’s hair, the pierced eyebrow, the ring on every finger, she decided the woman was precisely the right age and personality to hold up the package and say something like, “Ewww, these. My granny has to wear these.”

Mara decided if she could pull off a cool shrug and say, “Oh, yes,
they’re for my mom,” she might be able to make it out of the store with her dignity intact. But she could feel the warmth on her neck and cheeks and she knew her humiliation was showing in bright red. Her palms were sweating and her throat felt thick, and if anyone could pull off a casual, innocent remark to convince a cashier that “these aren’t for me,” it was not Mara Nichols.

There was a line at the register and she hovered nearby, one eye on the line and the other on the door in case Harry appeared. The cashier prattled on to each shopper, and the litany of Texas cheer Mara had always found endearing before—How are you today, ma’am? Did you find everything you came in for? I sure hope you’ll have a great day! You come back!—now felt like sharp nails against her inflamed skin.

When the last customer had gone, Mara stepped closer, feeling dizzy now, and with her remaining strength, hoisted the basket up onto the counter. She braced herself with one hand and promised her body it could collapse in the cab if only it would stay upright another few minutes. As the clerk raised her eyes in greeting, Mara reached for one of the gossip magazines on display near the register and snapped it open in front of her face, a barricade between her and the “Ewww, my granny wears these” comment, the anticipation of which was making Mara’s breakfast threaten to make an appearance.

“How are you today, ma’am?”

“Fine.” Mara felt her lips move but didn’t hear the word come out. She tried again, but again it came out as nothing more than a small push of air.

There was silence for a few seconds, and Mara guessed the cashier was waiting for her to look out from behind the magazine and respond more politely. Like a civilized person, she thought, and shame rose in another hot wave from her collarbone to her neck to her cheeks.

“And did you find everything you came in for? Oh, what on earth?”

The words clenched Mara’s heart and it stopped for a full few seconds before kick-starting itself and revving into high gear, beating in her
throat more than her chest. Holding her breath, she lowered the magazine a fraction and saw the cashier carrying one of the glaring white plastic packages, frowning as she turned it over in her hands. The woman looked at Mara, a puzzled expression on her face, and Mara wondered if a human’s skin could get so hot from humiliation that it broke out in blisters. Panicked, she eyed the door and tried to estimate how long it would take her to make it outside, and whether if she made a run for it, the cashier would chase her down, waving the diapers for everyone in the parking lot, including Harry, to see.

“Oh, here it is! Pesky bar codes can be so hard to find sometimes.” The girl held the package up to Mara to show the elusive symbol and Mara raised a hand, lowering it quickly, to indicate the girl should lower the package. But the girl stood motionless, smiling to herself for having located the bar code and not, evidently, in any rush to ring up the sale. From the corner of her eye, Mara saw an elderly man making his way from the end of an aisle to the register.

“I’m in a terrible hurry,” she said, in a voice she didn’t recognize.

The salesgirl jolted into action, running the scanner over the towels and the two packages. “Oh, yes, ma’am, no problem. That’ll be fifty-two ninety-five. Oh, wait—I think the undergarments had a coupon this week. In the circular? They’re at the front, near the baskets.” She pointed as the old man took a shuffling step closer. “Do you want to look—”

“I’ll just pay the full price,” Mara said, her eyes on the man now.

“Or I can, if you want me—”

“Just ring it up! Please, just ring up the fifty-two ninety-five. I really must go.” Mara thrust her credit card at the woman and buried her face in the gossip rag again before their eyes could meet.

“Certainly. Now, if you’ll look online when you get home, there may be a way to claim the value of the coupon as a rebate. You just go to www—”

“No!” Mara shot her hand up, smacked the magazine onto the counter and reached for the bags. “Just let me go!”

The cashier flinched. Wordlessly, she handed over the bags and receipt to Mara, who, too embarrassed by her behavior to speak, tried to fit a thank-you and an apology into a nod of her head.

“Well, I sure hope you’ll have a great day,” the cashier said mechanically. “Come back soon,” she added without feeling, at the same time Mara was thanking God she’d never have to come back again.