Unclaimed Baggage

by Jen Doll

  10

  Doris

  “They’re kind of a tradition in this town,” I explain as Nell picks up her very first Krispy Kreme Doughnut, an original glazed, which is the classic and also my personal favorite. They’re still warm from the oven, and as she takes a bite, the pastry collapses in her mouth and she lets out a little gasp.

  “Oh my God, this is so good,” she says. “Why have I never had these before?”

  We’re sitting in one of two booths at the tiny store, which is really more of a drive-thru operation. I asked her to meet me here after my shift ended partly because everyone should taste a Krispy Kreme Doughnut as quickly as possible once they step into a town that has them, and partly because, well, I think I might kind of want to be friends with the new girl.

  “They started as a Southern chain,” I tell her. “Mostly as a fund-raising business. At first, people sold them to make money for churches and schools. Later, they opened some retail stores. Luckily, we got this one. It’s one of the true perks of living here.”

  “It is an utter tragedy that I’ve spent sixteen years of life without knowing of their existence,” she says. “Is it wrong that I want another?”

  “The first time I had them, I ate six,” I confess. “I’d say it’s pretty normal.”

  She smiles and reaches for a chocolate iced glazed from the variety box we have opened in front of us; I grab my second favorite, the strawberry iced.

  “I’ve been really angry at my mom for making us move here,” she admits. “Ripping me from everything I knew the summer before junior year. I had great friends! I had a boyfriend, finally. I was happy.”

  I nod. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a boyfriend—or find one, for that matter. But I do know what it’s like to lose someone you love.” I decide to just come out with it. “My aunt died last summer.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, and reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. “My grandpa died a few years ago, and it was really, really sad. What happened?”

  “Well,” I begin, and suddenly tears are flowing down my cheeks as I tell her how my aunt Stella saved two kids from drowning but died herself. I’m full-on sobbing by the end of the story, and so is Nell.

  The cashier shuffles over and looks at us kindly. (Last summer I located a pair of Crocs for her in her favorite color, Krispy Kreme green.) “You girls OK?” she says, pulling a pack of Kleenex from her pocket and setting it in front of us. “Take these. I’ve got plenty. You never know when you’ll need a good cry.” She pats me on the shoulder and heads back to her post.

  “Thanks, Myrna,” I manage, and reach for the tissues, passing a wad over to Nell. “Stel lived with us for a while when I was a little kid, and then again when I was in middle school. She was ‘between things,’ figuring out what she wanted to do next. I’d come home from school, and we’d sit and talk. I told her everything. You know how some people just get you? She got me. This sounds lame, but in some ways, she was my best friend. She was in her thirties, but she seemed like a teenager sometimes.” I grab a tissue and wipe my eyes and nose. Fortunately, I’ve stopped crying. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” says Nell. “I get it. Really.”

  Another “thanks” is all I can think to say.

  “Why do people have to leave us?” asks Nell. “Why do we have to leave people? It just sucks.”

  “It really does,” I say.

  We end up sitting in that little booth for another hour talking about everything we can think of, everything and nothing all at once. I guess when you’re getting to know someone you might really click with—a potential new friend—it’s like it is with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Once you get started, you don’t want to stop.

  * * *

  “Hi, honey,” my mom says quietly when I walk in the door. The room is dark. Mom works at a catering company that does Southern party food like deviled eggs and chicken salad and cheese straws. A lot of nights I figure out what to eat for myself because she’s busy figuring it out for other people. But right now she’s home, which means she must not be feeling well.

  I sit next to her on the couch, where she’s resting with her eyes closed, her hand holding a cold cloth to her forehead. “Another migraine?” I ask.

  “The new prescription isn’t much better than the old one,” she says. My mom has always gotten headaches, but after Aunt Stella died, they got worse. Which is weird because Mom was never really close to Aunt Stella—in fact, it seems like her relationship with Stel was mostly based on criticizing her. Stel would listen patiently as her older sister scolded. Then she’d turn around and do whatever she felt like.

  My mom, well, I love her, but she has a lot of hang-ups about how people, especially women, are supposed to behave in the world. Her favorite words? Proper, and ladylike, and sweet, which, barf. If I were a therapist, I’d tell her she’s internalizing years of repression and shame and it shoots straight to her brain, where it twists and turns and causes pain and blurred vision and stars. But I’m just her wayward daughter with the views she says Stella put in my head, and she wouldn’t listen to me anyway.

  “How was work today?” she asks.

  “Pretty great, actually,” I say. “Red promoted me! I’m in charge of stockroom personnel. And I made my first hire!”

  She sets the cloth down and looks at me. “Does that also mean a raise?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He bumped me up a buck an hour.”

  She nods, satisfied at this. “That’s my girl. Any good things come into the store?”

  Even when she’s got a headache, my mom, like most people, loves to hear about bargains. She cheers up even more when I tell her about a new KitchenAid mixer that came in a box with a card on it to “the happy couple,” and starts speculating about whether the guest is obligated to send another gift, and what the legendary etiquette expert Emily Post would have to say if she were still alive.

  “The hire is a new girl from Illinois,” I tell her, mostly to change the subject. “Her name is Nell. She’ll be in my class at school, too.”

  “Where in Illinois?” asks Mom.

  “Near Chicago,” I tell her, and she makes a face that means “Ew, the big city” and/or “Ew, Yankees.” My parents are the perfect town cheerleaders, regardless of some of the obvious flaws of where we live. Not that there isn’t good stuff, too, but my parents gloss over the bad—like how black and white people rarely interact socially, or even go to the same restaurants, or how Maya Bloom’s family never gets invited to certain events on account of their religion, or how the country club didn’t even let in women as members until the ’90s.

  One of the things I like about Unclaimed is that pretty much everyone in town shops there. Red won’t stand for intolerance; once he kicked out a guy wearing a T-shirt with the Confederate flag on it. But my parents didn’t exactly get the memo. I’ll hear them talking about how things were so much “nicer” way back when. I want to ask, Nicer for who, exactly? And What does “nice” mean, anyway?

  A lot of the time, I feel like I was born into the wrong family. Especially now that my aunt’s gone.

  “You got some mail from your friend,” says my mom. There on the coffee table is a postcard with a picture of a bunch of girls wearing riding helmets and hugging each other. “Greetings from Camp Sunshine!” it says across the front. Maya loves sending postcards, but it can take weeks for them to arrive, so it’s hard to have a real conversation that way. Plus, I’m sure my mom reads them, though I’m also sure she doesn’t understand what they’re really about. I slip the postcard into my pocket to look at when I’m alone.

  “Oh!” says my mom, and at this she’s more excited than she was about the misdirected KitchenAid: “I almost forgot! Lydia Collins—you know, the football boy’s mom?—she called and left a message for you earlier today.” She gives me a big grin, migraine temporarily forgotten, because if someone related to the Grant Collins is calling her daughter, her daughter must finally be doing something
right. My mom’s most public secret is that she desperately wants me to be popular like she was in high school.

  “Weird,” I say. This is the second time I’m finding myself thinking about Grant Collins in less than a week. And just like I don’t understand why Chassie would be kissing someone who’s not Grant—at the store or out of it—I can’t for the life of me guess why Grant’s mom would be calling me.

  Mom glances around. “Now, where did I put that phone number?”

  I look past her to the table, then back to the pocket of her shirt, then next to the TV remote. I glance down in the crease of the couch for a telltale corner of paper, and I’m about to get up and walk to the kitchen to check the refrigerator when I see my mom’s note poking out from under the cloth she’d been using to soothe her headache.

  She follows my gaze and looks at me with an apologetic expression, then hands me the message, which is slightly damp. I shove it into my pocket along with Maya’s postcard, and excuse myself to my room.

  There, I flop onto my bed, my feet dangling off the edge, and examine my mail. It’s funny because Maya’s not even at a place called Camp Sunshine; she must have found this postcard in a shop somewhere. On the back, she’s written,

  Dear Doris,

  This is not my camp experience but that doesn’t mean I’m not having a good time. BTW I still hate horses. All of my girls are great except one of them only eats chicken nuggets and another one refuses to sleep at night and ANOTHER lost her retainer and you weren’t around to find it. FML. There’s a hottie counselor in the next cabin, though, and I think there might be a spark! How are you doing? Miss you terribly, tho I can’t say I miss home. TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON WITH YOU. It gets lonely in the wilderness JK JK.

  XOXOX MB

  I always write back immediately; that way the conversation doesn’t stall quite so fast. Conveniently, I have a bunch of postcards with the Unclaimed Baggage logo on them that were made for a promotion years ago. I found them in an old file cabinet in the store, and Red let me take them home. I pull one of those out of my desk and start writing, adding pictures in the margins, as usual.

  MAYA!!!!

  Miss you too. Summer without you and Stella is weird. But! There’s a new girl in town and she might be cool. I’m investigating. Also, Grant Collins and Chassie might have broken up? Is the world ending?

  P.S., send me updates about your crush, and don’t clam up around her the way you usually do! Make a move! Notify me immediately if something big happens. I wanna know!

  xoxoxoxo Doris

  I stamp and address the card and slip it in my bag to put in the mailbox tomorrow on my way out. Then I pull out Grant’s mom’s number and hold the piece of paper in my hand for a few moments. If I don’t call back, I’ll never hear the end of it from my mom, so I punch in the digits, my heart beating a little bit faster than usual. I’m picturing Grant picking up and what I’ll do then, but a woman answers on the first ring. It’s Mrs. Collins, who I used to see regularly when she’d drop Grant off at Sunday school, back when I used to go, too, before I officially decided that church wasn’t my thing. That was the summer before seventh grade, which is, not coincidentally, around the time I started thinking Grant Collins was a huge jerk.

  “Oh, Doris! Thanks for calling me back so quickly,” says Mrs. Collins. It comes out callin’, her words dripping with verbal molasses the way some women here do when they’re fixin’ to ask a favor. “Can you hold on just a sec, sweetie?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. I hear some muffled conversation and rustling, and then everything is quiet.

  “Doris?” she asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I repeat.

  “Sweetie, can I trust you to keep something just between us?”

  “Sure,” I answer.

  “Well, it’s about Grant.…”

  Duh.

  “He’s found himself with a bit of time on his hands, and Red Finster tells me you’re the person to talk to about getting Grant a job. I’m sure it would help him to be around people, to have some structure, and I thought maybe—”

  “You want me to hire Grant?” I ask. The guy must be in some serious shit if she’s having to call in favors with me. What happened to football camp? Or Chassie? Or being king of the world?

  “Well, isn’t that so sweet of you?” she answers, even though I haven’t actually said I’d give her son a job. “He’s very strong, as I’m sure you can imagine. You won’t be disappointed.”

  The last thing I want is Grant Collins in my space, in my store. In fact, I’d be perfectly fine never to see Grant Collins again, even if most of the female student body of my high school feels differently. But I can’t help thinking about Aunt Stella. How she was a connector. How she saved those kids, even at the cost of her own life. I guess that’s why, instead of telling Mrs. Collins it will be a cold day in hell (which is where I’m sure at least a few people in town think I’ll end up) before I hire her son, I say, “Can he come to the store at ten tomorrow morning? I can talk to him about the job then.”

  “Wonderful,” says Mrs. Collins, relief in her voice.

  I wish I felt the same way.

  11

  Grant

  I may not remember everything, but there’s one thing I can’t forget. The last conversation I had with Coach. Lately whenever I’m alone and quiet—and sober—there’s a chance of it starting to run through my head again.

  “Grant,” he says, beckoning me into his office, which is really just a supply closet they converted because he’s the coach of a public high school’s football team, not Paul “Bear” Bryant. He’s sitting on an exercise ball instead of a chair because he says he’s starting to get fat, but really he’s solid as a rock, a barrel-chested man with sturdy arms and legs, the kind of guy you could see running through a line of defense without breaking a sweat. There’s a photo on his desk of him doing just that when he played for the University of Alabama back in the ’80s. It’s turned around to face whoever’s sitting in the chair across from him, which in this case is me.

  “Grant,” he says again, “I’m gonna talk to you like you’re a man.”

  I guess I appreciate that, even though I’ve never felt less like a man than I do sitting across from my huge coach on his plastic ball of a chair.

  “You know I never wanted you off the team. Hell, I still want you on the team,” he tells me. “There’s plenty of leeway I gave you. But then you had to go do something like this.” He frowns. “You had to get the police involved.”

  I can’t say I meant to. I can’t say much of anything.

  “Boys drinking, hey, it happens. Boys messing around with girls, it happens, too. And plenty of people drink and drive around here, you and I both know that. But the administration has decided to crack down this year, harder than ever. Zero tolerance policy. Not to mention, you made yourself a spectacle. How do I explain you falling all over the field, weaving everywhere, scoring for the wrong damn team? Or operating a motor vehicle, drunk, with the head cheerleader in the front seat? Or crashing that car in a ditch and fleeing the scene? Good Lord, boy. I need this job. And I need our team to win, and I certainly don’t need any nasty rumors swirling about my starting quarterback.”

  Even, apparently, if those rumors are true. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  He pounds his fist on the desk, and the photograph shakes in its silver frame. “We’re all sorry. Damn sorry. But it doesn’t change anything.”

  It sure doesn’t.

  It’s been a warm winter, and it’s an even hotter April. He wipes at the sweat forming on his upper lip. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he says. “For now, you’re off the team. With the new policy, I’m not supposed to give you a second chance.”

  I nod. I understand.

  He leans in close.

  “You’re gonna need to see a headshrinker. Don’t worry, I know just the right person. I’ve already talked to your parents. The police department is on board, too; I’ve been friends with the pol
ice chief for a long time, and since you’re Grant Collins and this is most definitely a one-time thing”—he stares at me hard—“they’ll write up the incident as a vehicular problem. Lucky for you, Chassie’s not interested in pressing charges. We’ve convinced her to keep things under wraps. You need to keep this under wraps, too. Don’t tell a soul about what really happened after the game, and I can make it go away. As far as anyone knows, this is a leave of absence due to injuries. If you can get the all clear from Dr. Laura by the time senior year starts, we’ll take you back and you can help us win the championship. Which I know, son, is what you want to do, too.”

  I don’t know if it’s what I want to do, but going along with Coach’s plan sounds a lot better than the alternative. Who am I without football?

  You know what I’m afraid of? That I’m no one at all.

  12

  Nell

  It’s my first day at my new job, and I’m sweating my butt off in the parking lot. At nine a.m. it’s already more than ninety degrees of the exact opposite of “dry heat,” and, per Doris’s instructions, I’m wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt plus a hoodie. I’m also carrying two boxes of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts—as instructed by Doris, who gave me the money from petty cash—for the staff meeting. Red’s change is perched precariously on top. I can see the accident before it comes.

  “No!” I yell as the money plummets to the concrete below, and then the top box is going, too. I try to save it while keeping the bottom box steady, but it’s a leaning tower of doughnut, and there’s sweat trickling into my eye, and it’s going down. I wonder if Krispy Kreme would be interested in sampling my new artisanal asphalt and gravel flavor? Then an arm reaches out, and it’s attached to a boy, and suddenly both boxes are securely in his arms. There has been no doughnut carnage. We have been saved. I squat down to pick up the loose change and grin up at him. And I blush because, dear God, this boy is cute. I may be taken, but I can still acknowledge beauty.

  “Hi,” he says. “Looked like you needed some help.”