The Bag Boy's Manager's Mother

Dave is closing in on a milestone. He has been working at the Swift-Savers grocery store on 10th Street for 4 years and 359 days. Employees who reach five years of service become eligible for a nifty green badge with a roman numeral five on it. As you might imagine, Dave was beyond thrilled. When he was hired the summer that he turned 16, he didn’t expect to work there for five months, let alone five years. Dave is not a psychic though. At the time of hire, he didn’t know that he would be expelled from high school and kicked out of his parent’s house that same summer. It’s actually a wonder that he didn’t lose his job too.

Dave is a bag boy. He asks people if they want paper or plastic and offers to push their carts to their cars. Enthusiasm drips from his workplace demeanor like sap from a tree. He actually has had 59 formal complaints made against him. They are all filed in the manager’s office, inside a folder labeled “dAVE”. That’s not a typo either. Dave’s manager happens to disdain traditional punctuation. Ironically, Dave’s manager’s mother was an elementary school teacher. Elementary school teachers are paid about as well as grocery store bag boys at Swift-Savers, in case you were wondering.

Dave’s manager’s mother’s name is Sally.

Sally realized during her third year of teaching that there was an untapped market for moving anonymous packages from seller to buyer. In her defense, it was a completely innocent discovery. She didn’t put an ad in the newspaper advertising these services. All that she did was conduct the semi-annual parent-teacher conferences that the school principal required.

Silas Dinwiddie’s father came in frazzled and five minutes late for his fifteen-minute session. He attempted to light a cigarette but Sally spontaneously slapped it out of his hand before the flame ignited. In the entire quarter-century that she had lived, Sally had never done anything so bold. They both froze and stared at each other’s feet. Mr. Dinwiddie finally lifted his gaze and picked up the slapped away items from off of the floor. Returning them to his coat pocket, he cleared his throat and spoke. “Ma’am, your callousness is admirable. Let’s then skip the part where we dance around the reality that Silas is an OK student who will do OK enough for you to pass him to the next grade and about how we can both be OK with that. Would that be alright?” he asked. She smiled and nodded in reluctant agreement. She wondered how then would they spend the remaining nine minutes of their session.

It was over those following nine minutes that he relayed to her a proposition that, while deviant, would prove simply too lucrative for her to pass up. The short version being that she would become a mule of sorts. Every Monday morning there would be a package, wrapped in brown paper, to be found in her lower left desk drawer. How it got there would be of no concern to her. She was asked only to drop the unmarked package in the mailbox on 8th Street on her way home each Monday afternoon. In exchange, $1000 would be mailed to her once a week, in the form of a traveler’s check.

Mr. Dinwiddie’s session was set to end in two minutes and Sally hadn’t spoken since greeting him. Flashes of being rich and going to jail and taking her son on trips to the beach and only seeing him from the other side of a Plexiglas wall bounced against each other inside her head. Her palms were sweaty and her mouth was dry. Although she wanted to speak, all she could muster was an up-and-down nod. That was enough though. “Very well” said Mr. Dinwiddie, as he reached back into his coat pocket. This time Sally didn’t flinch as he lit his cigarette. She allowed her eyes to close as he walked out of the classroom and closed the door.

Sally never saw Mr. Dinwiddie again.

Sally now stood across from Dave. She could tell that he didn’t want to be there. He could tell that she was feeling unappreciated. He felt a rare twinge of selflessness as his mind raced for something to say that may cheer her up. But there really was nothing that a high school dropout could say to an underappreciated teacher who was buying her own retirement cake. He shuffled for a moment and then picked up the next-to-last copy of yesterday’s newspaper from the end of the checkout counter. He shyly offered her the newspaper. Maybe she wouldn’t want it, maybe she already had a copy at home, but she did, and she did not.

When she got home, Sally put her newly purchased cake into the refrigerator and sat down to read the day-old newspaper. The headlines didn’t interest her, neither did the sports nor entertainment sections. A few classifieds caught her eye, particularly the one selling mismatched kitchen china. Sally rarely read the obituaries, but today she was curious. Maybe her pending retirement was making her feel a little closer to that ultimate fate. Her eyes searched for any familiar names. She saw just one.

Silas Dinwiddie Sr. passed away of natural causes. He is survived by his son, Silas Dinwiddie Jr. and his daughter, known to the family only as ‘the school teacher’.

Dave glanced at the clock on the wall as he sauntered through the automatic doors out onto the sidewalk. It was 10:00 at night. He lived two blocks away in a studio apartment, but Dave did not practice healthy sleep habits and was not ready to call it a night. Sometimes he just liked to cruise around the block. In between familiar signs of restaurants that he was tired of and clothing stores that he’d never shopped in, he noticed an empty store. For the life of him he couldn’t remember what had been there before. The glass windows looked like something sticky had recently been pulled off of them. A padlock hung on the door handle, but it had not been interlocked with the other side of the door frame. Dave timidly tugged on the door to creak it open. He shuffled across the dusty floor towards the back of the store where a single door remained. This door also initially appeared to be locked, but in fact was not. Opening the door, he saw what appeared to be a supply closet, stacked with notebook-sized packages, wrapped in brown paper. There must have been a couple thousand. He noticed that the paper on the packages closer to the back appeared to have faded and the ones closer to the front seemed crisper. He had already broken into the building, sort of. His curiosity was not to be let down now. He reached over and grabbed one from the middle and began to unwrap it. Needless to say, he was disappointed to find nothing but a stack of blank paper inside.