For Rachel, Get Well Soon.

A yellow Toyota Celica rattled to a halt in the parking lot of the supermarket. The driver got out, closed the door. Looked down, opened the door, pushed the lock button down, and closed the door again, holding the handle up. He walked around the front of the car, running his fingers along the hood, drumming them near the antenna, and opened the passenger door, nearly hitting himself in the knee with it as it swung past him.
A pair of crutches extruded themselves from the interior recesses of the car, followed by a woman, who stood on her left foot and shifted her weight, rocking her pelvis side to side. She stepped away from the car, crutch tips hitting the ground unevenly, and he swung the door closed. Looked down, opened it, pushed the lock button down, and closed it again, holding the handle up.
She started immediately towards the supermarket front door. He grabbed a nearby cart and followed her, taking a detour around a Nissan Pathfinder to collect two other carts as he went. He didn't always push the carts straight; he pushed them forward, and if their wheels were sliding slightly sideways, scrubbing lines on the hot black asphalt, he didn't seem to notice.
The supermarket had no front doors. Cold air blew out from the tiled entrance, blowing her short hair back and luffing her skirt briefly. She looked carefully at the ground, picking each step as she went. He followed.
"If you'd like to sit down at the service counter, Rachel, I'll get the stuff on the list." He flicked the carts forward; the first two in the stack he'd accumulated fled to their peers, while the third stayed firmly in his hands.
She shook her head no, "Thanks, Jamie, but I like my bananas green," and started towards FRESH PRODUCE, hoping that maybe there was.
"I'll get, uh, bread and milk and stuff." He turned the cart to his right, wheels scrubbing and chirping, and walked forward. People moved slightly, so that wherever he was heading, there was a clear space. Perhaps they sensed him coming, and thought that unless he was paying more attention to his surroundings than he looked like, they could get rammed. He was a big man, and he looked like he could move big things. People thought it was ironic, that such a large person would spend his days putting tiny resistors in little holes, soldering surface-mount capacitors onto pads beneath a microscope. He didn't tell them that his day job actually involved lifting desks, removing doors, tossing 50-lb garbage pails full of uneaten school lunches into dustbins, doing anything that the elderly janitor at Horace Mann Elementary School was physically unable to do. He didn't mention that job to anyone; he preferred the mystique of electronic design, although it was a far stretch to consider three hours a day of soldering the same five resistors onto a circuit board to be Electronic Design. But, it was part of what he did for a living.
The bananas were too ripe. She hated brown bananas. She hated crutches. She hated having to wear high heels every day, and she hated inconsiderately placed storm drains. Graceful movement was a vital part of her life, sales of appearances, but there was no grace in crutches or broken ankles. The bracelet on her wrist caught the overhead lights on its hammered surface as she searched for a single green banana. There were more rotten ones than she could want or count, and she was always searching for one that hadn't gone bad. But somehow the supermarket seemed to know; they were invariably beyond redemption by the time she met them.
After a desultory search, ("Fruitless," a little voice in her head said,) she gave up and just stood there, with her leg lifted like a crane in a pond. Jamie was off somewhere else, buying very healthy bread no doubt, and without his solicitousness she could close her eyes and allow herself to stop ignoring how badly her leg hurt. Damn, rent due. Double damn, big food bill. He'd probably buy all sorts of expensive healthy food. Her mind went back to two nights before, when she'd gotten home from the hospital, and he'd brought muffins and decent green bananas and oranges over, and wonder of wonders, not overstayed. Freshly baked muffins. The first time he'd actually gotten through her front door, and he'd left after thirty seconds. She forgave him pre-emptively any purchases he would make.
She sometimes wondered how he managed to exist. He seemed so childlike, for lack of a better word; he'd run to catch up to her when she drove into the apartment complex and got out of her car. He'd probably waited for five minutes in his car, so that he could open the door and walk along the white sidewalk, scuffing his shoes across the dandelions, and appear as if by coincidence to walk and talk to her. When she was young, she had a big dumb Labrador retriever, named Farley, and he'd sit in the corner, eyes looking at her, tail wagging gently, waiting, until she said, "Farley," even in the middle of a conversation or interspersed in the middle of random words, and with that one slight cue, he'd run to her and lick her. She'd recorded his name on a tape, and played it, while watching from a window nearby. Farley ran up to the tape player and sniffed around, looked around, wagging his tail slowly. She'd felt guilty about that trick for years, and she felt guilty about Jamie now, as if she'd just done the same thing to him.
He thought he was in love with her. They both knew it. She had nothing against him, in particular. He was just some guy, if not quite seeming to live in the same world as she did, and he probably did normal guy things and thought normal guy thoughts. Most of the normal guys that she knew usually resented paying first and left the motel room without even saying goodbye.
"Seven Grain Bread. Total. Four half-gallons of 2% milk." His voice interrupted her reverie. She looked in the basket and there they were. "Potatoes." He pointed and grinned.
"What's that awful thing?" She pointed and grimaced.
"Kiwi. You said you'd never had one, so I figured you should try it."
She blinked once. "I said I'd never had a kiwi?"
"Well, have you?"
"No. But I don't remember talking about them."
Jamie nodded as if to convince her. "About two months ago. You came home from shopping or something and you were complaining about all the bananas being overripe, and I asked you if you'd ever tried kiwi."
"Oh," she said. "Is that how you knew to get the green ones you gave to me the other night?"
Jamie nodded; she could see his tail wagging in another part of her mind. Hidden under a fold of the potato bag, she could see a green plant stem enclosed in a hard plastic shell, with greenish liquid surrounding it. "Red rose, no doubt," she thought to herself. "Why do they always pick red?"
"Gonna take me a minute to get to the front," is what she said. "Would you get some, uh, Velveeta on the way out?"
"Yeah," he said, and he was gone, like a lost locomotive. Looking up at him made her neck hurt.
Their assignation at the counter was entertaining; Jamie immediately grabbed the Weekly World News, to her delight, and started trying to find pictures of aliens. "Somehow you'd think an alien wouldn't look like Tammy Faye, if it had evolved on another planet, would you? I mean, I'd expect them to have five arms and no head, personally."
Rachel nodded, "Yeah, well, looks sell. If they didn't look kinda human, people wouldn't be as interested."
"Huh." Jamie exhaled in disgust.
The woman in front of them suppressed her apparent hand tremors enough to finish writing a check and walked through, and the checker turned around to look at Rachel, and oh SHIT it's two-minute Jay and he's looking RIGHT at me and he obviously recognizes me and I hate that knowing leer even more than I hate the look he has on his face when he walks up to me on the corner damn damn damn. And I REALLY hate the way he's looking at Jamie. No it's not like that, you bastard, and I don't need your $50 a week from now on.
And the clerk was turning back around, responding to a voice that said, "Daddy," as a blond 9-year-old boy ran up. A woman walked up, a faded woman in a nylon sweater, and Rachel looked at her, and Rachel suddenly felt very tired and very sad, and even a little sorry for two-minute Jay, who looked white-faced at his wife as she said, "Jay, dear, I'm here to get some jello pops for the neighbor kids. Are you alright? You look like you just saw a ghost."
"Naw, honey, I'm fine," said two-minute Jay, and she walked off. The boy looked up, suddenly, and said, "Hey, Jamie!" and Jamie coughed and looked over at Rachel, and then at the ground, and then suddenly grinned and said, "Hey, Russell."
"Mom's getting me jello pops!" said Russell, and he walked past his father. "Seeya tomorrow, Jamie!"
"Seeya, Russell. Get chocolate ones," Jamie said to the rapidly disappearing back, and his face turned red.
And they were out in the car, and both of them were very still, and neither of them knew quite what to say.
"You probably wonder how I know Russell, don't you?" Jamie finally said, in a really quiet voice.
Rachel blinked, and searched for a response, and finally managed, "No, actually I wondered why you left so quickly after you dropped off that basket of food the other evening."
"Hm." Jamie thought a bit. "Well. Ok, I saw you get out of your car, on crutches, and I figured you were probably not going to be able to work at the jewelry store for a couple of days." Rachel winced inwardly; she'd told him she worked in a jewelry store for lack of something more creative. "So I figured, well, I could probably help you cook and do laundry and do dishes, and I suddenly realized that I could be a real pain in the ass. And I guess I realized that you probably aren't impressed by what sort of job I have, and that you probably don't think about me every day, and I decided that maybe I wouldn't, uh, inflict myself on you."
"Well, there aren't many jobs that impress me, but I really appreciate you helping me get my groceries."
Jamie sighed again and put on the brakes gently, to stop at a light. "Rachel, I'm a janitor. I've swept the same hallway for the last eight years. In an elementary school."
Rachel put her hand on his arm. "Why do people live lies?"
"I guess because they can't face what they've become."
The traffic was at a standstill. From somewhere ahead, they could hear the whoomph of tubas. "There's a parade. We're stuck," Jamie said. He turned around and rummaged around in one of the brown sacks. His hand returned, bearing somewhere within it a kiwi.
"Russell seemed like he liked you," Rachel said.
"Yeah. He's a neat kid. We play miss-and-out basketball after school sometimes." Jamie smiled halfway. "Wanna go see the parade?"
"Sure," she said. "Why not?"
He took the kiwi and a pocketknife and got out of the car. As she got out, he reached into the car behind her and pulled a green banana out of the other sack. "It was in with the apples; you must not have seen it," he said, half-apologetically.