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From
"Beener"
by
Emily Olson
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I grew up, lost
weight, got a job, and tried to forget him. But there
was always
a part of me that waited, and for a while, Beener didn’t
let me down. He used
to drop by the house after he got a girl pregnant, drunk
and scared, just to talk.
After a while he just stopped.
I used to mark his birthday on my calendar, it was
sometime in late July, and I
wrote it down so I would remember him. When I stopped
marking the date, I had
moved away from the glossy, romantic memories and on
with my life. But I always
thought of Beener, wondered what he ended up doing.
Years later, I ran into him in the grocery store,
walking through the produce aisle
looking for asparagus. I love asparagus. As I stood in
front of the metal, water-filled
tray trying to choose a bunch from the scraggly-looking
lot of green stalks,
I heard his voice behind me, deep and rather annoyed.
"Come on, let’s GO," he said. I turned
around slowly and there was the
Beener, standing by the tomato display next to a
short, dark-haired woman pushing
a cart. Two kids wriggled in the child’s seat while a
third hung on his arm,
pulling on it, saying "Daddy, pleeeez, Daddy, I
want it, pleeeeze..."
He didn’t see me, so I turned around again quick
and grabbed my asparagus, stuffed
it in a plastic bag and headed to the checkout. They
went the other way, so
as I stood in line I could see them coming down the
aisle again, this time along the
freezer section. The kids were clamoring for ice cream,
and I watched him pull
out a jumbo-sized box of Fudgesicles and toss it in the
cart.
"Steve, those will rot their teeth," the
(wife? must be. girlfriend? nah. wife) woman
said. Her own voice was kind of high and squeaky.
"It’s summer," he retorted, walking away
from her down the row of glass doors.
He had the same swagger he had when I knew him, and wore
the same faded
Levis, this time with black motorcycle boots instead of
raggedy sneakers. He
also wore a white T-shirt, with a pack of Marlboros
rolled up in one sleeve.
Same old Beener, I thought.
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