Fiction
A Man on a Mission
Sometimes you see yourself in a different life.
The Uni-Mart at the corner of Ellsworth Ave. and Summerlea St. was always busy after midnight on weekends, so I wasn’t surprised when there were five people ahead of me in the check-out. From where I stood, I could see my car, and, inside it, the woman who — unbeknownst to either of us — would one day be my wife. She sat in the passenger seat, fooling with the radio while she waited with the engine running, keeping warm. The Friday night Uni-Mart stop had, over the course of that fall and winter, become a kind of ritual for us.
The queue moved up. I was fifth in line, then fourth, then third. Customers wandered into line behind me, keeping the queue length steady at six or seven people. The lean, bespectacled guy at the register always worked the Friday night late shift. He had the countenance of a bookkeeper, his hair slicked back from a hairline that had just begun to recede, and he moved with the unhurried pace of someone who had settled into his job for the long haul. I’d visited the Uni-Mart on enough…
