The Sunflower and The Cashier

 “Would you like me to help you pack your bags?” I say with a smile.

“That would be lovely.” The woman standing in front of me has purple hair, an eyebrow piercing, and a tattoo of a hummingbird on her upper arm.

She is one of hundreds of customers I serve a day, but she doesn’t know that her gentle presence, as she comes through my cash has brightened my day.

I tell her I like her hummingbird tattoo; her eyes twinkle. She lets me in on the story of how she got it.

I see the family from yesterday coming up to my cash next. The two girls are giggling in the shopping cart and the mother is holding her newborn. I feel a pang of longing.

But I never wanted children, I tell myself. I repeat the story in my head I’ve told many others, “Ever since I was a teenager, I never wanted them.” Or what I said on Friday night, “I’d just be resentful.”

I look at the mother glow. The woman with the purple hair catches me looking at the mother and smiles. I hand her the receipt and tell her,  “Have a good one, eh”.

The woman with the purple hair takes her bags and the mother starts loading her groceries onto the belt.

On a Tuesday in July, my counselor had said “ who remembers the cashier who served them.”

On a Tuesday in March, I asked my dad “what is your legacy; how will you immortalize yourself?”

I sit with these questions.

It’s Friday, March 26th. The black SUV is back.

The snowstorm is expected for tomorrow.  I tell myself it’s just the paranoia everyone’s been telling me I have when “I’m not thinking clearly”.

“You haven’t eaten enough, have had three coffees, and have been staring out the window all morning” she tells me.

I have just walked out to my car for the fifth time this morning, after worrying that the person who locked their car door, as I walked by, was doing it because of me.

As I sit in my car looking at the cemetery, I wonder who it could be? Is it someone from the city? Someone from 10 years ago? Someone from a past life?

“Creepy black SUV around your apartment” I message him, as if it’s my last words.

I walk up to the apartment on my way back in, and my ears start ringing. I remember Van Gogh cut his ear off because of a ringing.

I remind myself that my husband, as the neighbour had called him, will be home soon and I should make the home presentable. “But the black suv”, she whispers.