Evening Scenes from a Corner Store Camera

It had been a White Hen Pantry, a 7-11, and a Convenience Mart before becoming a Stop & Go.

Before all that it had been Henry’s Market, back when Jenny was just a kid.  It was their local spot only a few blocks down from where her family lived.  She could ride her bike and save her parents a car trip, which was usually rewarded with her buying a coke and a candy bar for herself.  Henry’s was a full-fledged grocery store, albeit a fairly small one, complete with a glass deli counter.  It didn’t stock everything you’d find at a major chain, but you could get all the essentials along with some specialty items that the bigger stores tended to overlook.

Now it was pretty much just snacks and canned goods with even staples like milk largely displaced in the refrigerator case by cold-brew coffee and energy drinks.  Despite these changes, Jenny still found herself there a few times a week.  The deli counter had been removed ages ago, but aside from that the interior layout hadn’t changed much from when she was twelve. 

Halfway through high school her parents split up and sold the house.  Jenny moved with her mom into a small two-bedroom home and her dad rented an apartment at the other end of town.  Henry’s became a bit too far for a bike ride and the last thing she wanted to do on the rare occasions she got to use the car was drive to the store, so she’d mostly stopped going by the time it transformed into the first of the corporate joints. 

She wasn’t home to visit much after leaving for college, but then grad school hadn’t gone as planned and she moved back in with her mom and started frequenting the Stop & Go.  The cashier Sarah was the manager’s daughter and usually the one handling most of the customer interaction, though Jenny occasionally caught sight of her dad Marvin rearranging items on shelves or putting a display up by the glass storefront, which wasn’t much bigger than a picture window.

Jenny enjoyed swapping stories with Sarah about their respective parents, each of whom had medical issues they were reluctant to deal with, and about being too young to feel like caretakers.  They also talked about Sarah’s mom, who had died when she was nine, and Jenny’s dad, who remarried a few years after the divorce and pretended his former family didn’t exist.  Jenny’s relationship with her mother, living as roommates, and on some level peers, was often difficult to navigate, and she appreciated having Sarah to parse through conversations and figure out how to best address things with her mom without generating misunderstandings or unwanted drama.  Sarah’s dynamic with her father was different, though equally awkward.

“Sometimes I feel like I became her after she passed away.”  Sarah said one night over beers with Jenny in the back of the store after she’d closed up.  “Not that my dad ever asked me to do that, but he already had so much on his plate that there really wasn’t any choice.”

“I can’t imagine having to grow up that fast.”

“Honestly, I barely noticed it was happening. Just ended up being the way things were.  Same with the store after my dad took over.  He didn’t have to ask if I’d help run the place with him, it was just a given.”

Jenny nodded.  “Yeah, some days it seems like mom and I are living out a suburban Grey Gardens scenario.”

“Just don’t start talking to the walls and the stuffed animals.”

“You’re assuming I don’t do that already.”

Sarah laughed and handed Jenny another beer from the fridge.