After I Met Her at the A&P by Keith Parker

After I Met Her at the A&P by Keith Parker

The last time I saw her was in the cracked parking lot behind the A&P, the late summer heat shimmering over the asphalt. She stood by an old blue Buick sedan with rust outlining the wheel wells. She tried to find her keys with one hand while shielding her eyes from the sun. A paper grocery sack, the kind with handles, was pressed between her hip and the car door. She hadn’t seen me yet.

“Elle,” I said.

She flinched and dropped her keys and I immediately felt guilty. After all these years (decades, when you think about it) the need to be vigilant was like a reflex. A molester will do that to you.

Her face was thinner than I remembered. Sharper. Her hair, once thick and curly and blonde, lay flat, streaked with browns and grays. She wore a tea dress with a small tear on one hem. I wore faded blue jeans and a 26.2 T-shirt with its sleeves rolled to my shoulders.

She blinked several times, as if she didn’t recognize me, then her lips parted.

“Ruthie,” she whispered. “My God.”

Suddenly, I was seventeen again, standing outside the high school gym, the smell of cigarettes and perfume in the air, Elle laughing, leaning close to whisper things about boys, sex, teachers and what she’d seen at her mother’s salon.

I smiled and avoided her eyes. “It’s me.”

She was already pulling me in, arms tight. “Jesus, it’s been… forever.”

“A lifetime,” I said.

I had been, and yet the memories were as vivid now as they had been our senior year. I still dreamed about her. And fantasized, of course. We don’t lie to ourselves about that.

& & &

We ended up at our old haunt, a diner with cracked booths, the smell of stale coffee and BLTs made with Wonder Bread and wilted lettuce. The wrinkle-faced waitress (her name tag said, “Hi, I’m Suzy!”) didn’t recognize us… Why would she? The last time we were here we were kids, splitting an order of soggy fries drenched in generic Ketchup and daring each other to steal a the salt and pepper shakers just to see if we could away with it. And we were probably drunk off wine coolers or beer we’d smuggled across the state line.

Elle propped her grocery bag on the seat next to her. She told me she’d gotten a great deal on farm fresh eggs and real butter, none of which would have survived the summer heat in her car. When “Hi, I’m Suzy!” brought the coffee, Elle stirred thick cream into her cup and watched it swirl like a scientist puzzling over an experiment.

I took bite of my sandwich. It was… chewy.

“So?” she said, then stammered. “Are you… back?”

I shrugged. “Guess so.”

“Where you been?”

“Married. For a while. Now I’m not.”

“Two of us.”

She didn’t wear a ring and there was not an indentation where one had been. Her nails were short, bitten. I noticed a faint bruise on her wrist.

“You back, too?” I said.

She waved a hand. “Same old shit.”

I hesitated and watched her take a sip of her coffee. She wasn’t wearing lipstick.

“Heard about your mom,” I said.

Elle’s eyes flickered, just for a second. “It happened.”

I said I was sorry, but it was such a faint mumble that neither she nor I actually heard what I said. And of course, I also wondered if it mattered. Thoughts? Prayers? Those words often rang hollow.

Elle’s mother had been found dead in their old Victorian on an unseasonably warm morning in January. People whispered about foul play because people whisper. That’s what they do. And hide things.

The animals had gotten to the body before the humans had. I knew the body had been picked over, and Elle knew I knew, so there was no point discussing it. The only thing people are better at than whispering is not saying what they think.

Suzy the waitress brought Elle a vegetable plate: Mashed potatoes, steamed cabbage, fried okra. She studied it with her eyes half-closed, a talent she’d possessed her whole life.

“God,” she said. “Remember the time we drove to the lake? We had a bucket of fried chicken.”

“The Colonel,” I said. “And threw a rod in your car on the way back. We had to walk three miles.”

She nodded. “Remember what you said you saw? Something in the trees?”

I ground my teeth. “I did see it.”

Elle smirked, shook her head. “You cried a bit. You were always scared.”

Not all the time, I thought. Not about everything. Just the things I couldn’t explain. Things without names. But I didn’t press the matter.

I changed the subject. The weather. The election. Our children…. both the good and the bad.

We fell into an easy rhythm and eventually shared a piece of apple pie with cheddar cheese on top. There was the time we stole a six-pack of Bud Lite from her brother’s truck. And the night she dared me to French kiss a greasy boy I didn’t like. And the afternoon we played hooky to watch soaps and eat two full half-gallons of Blue Bell ice cream (triple chocolate with chocolate syrup). And of course the summer when we stayed inside because of the kidnappings and rapes. When they stopped we swore we’d leave the goddamn town and never look back.

When we finished chin-wagging, I sat back against the vinyl upholstery. It cracked and moaned.

I shook my head. “Why the hell did we come back?”

It was a rhetorical question, actually, and was not really an issue worth pondering but I asked it just the same because that’s what people do in addition to whispering: They ask why and never get an answer beyond tiresome quotes from Shakespeare and The Bible.

“No earthly idea,” she said.

“What do you tell yourself?”

She hunched her sharp shoulders. “He’s dead.”

“The molester?”

“Yes.”

And at that we sat in silence while, outside, the sun had slipped lower and shadows stretched across the pavement. A diesel truck blew its horn.

Elle put her napkin on the table and stood quickly. “I should go.”

She got her grocery sack and dropped a crumpled twenty dollar bill on the table. “Hi, I’m Suzy!” would be getting a nice tip.

We walked out together, the air thick with humidity and exhaust.

At her car, she hesitated. “I’m glad this happened.”

“Me, too.”

She opened her door, then paused. “Listen….”

“Yeah?”

Her voice softened now. “That night. You really saw something, didn’t you?”

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“You saw him.”

“Yeah.”

Elle nodded. She had always known.

And then she was gone, her brakes squeaking as she took a right out of the parking lot where the diner and A&P had been for years (decades, when you think about it).

& & &

The next morning a meter reader with the city found her sedan with the rust around the wheel wells. The car was abandoned by the lake. The windows were down. Rain had blown in. A grocery sack was dumped over in the passenger seat.

Elle was never seen again.

* * * * The End * * * *
Copyright Keith Parker 2025