The View from Mount Joy Read Free

swarming with kids in the summer.”
    I did get the job, although the cashiers and bag boys saw far more of the swarming kids than I did as a stock boy. But I didn’t care; I was content to be alone in the back room, slapping prices on cases of Rice-A-Roni with a little sticker gun, wondering what my friends up in Granite Creek were doing. I didn’t allow myself to brood in front of my mother—she had enough problems without me to worry about—but I wasn’t ready to transfer my loyalties to new kids here and liked my solitude, liked punctuating every thought of Jamie Jensen with a little
blat
of the sticker gun, liked feeling my muscles strain as I lifted crates and boxes off the trucks, liked sitting on a ladder, having my lunches of Slim Jims and Dr Pepper late in the afternoon, after everyone else had had their break. But after a week or so, my self-imposed social moratorium got boring, and I found myself wandering up to the front of the store during breaks to chat with the cashiers—three college girls and a young housewife—and the bag boys, gangly junior high kids full of zits and braces.
    “So you’re goin’ to Ole Bull, huh?” asked Kirk, the gangliest and zittiest one, and when I nodded, he said, “My sister goes there.”
    “Is she cute?” I asked, figuring if there was any family resemblance between the two, it was a moot question.
    “She’s a bitch is what she is,” he said, but before I could ask for further details, the store owner appeared and Kirk suddenly busied himself straightening out the stack of paper bags.
    “The dairy truck’s here,” said Mr. Haugland, as if announcing a losing score. He was a guy in his late thirties who had inherited his grandfather’s store—but none of the old man’s enthusiasm or love of the grocery business.
    “I wanted to be a professional musician,” he had complained to me my first day on the job. “I had a band—the Courtmen—in college. We did covers—Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry—but some original stuff too. Damn, I had it made.”
    “What happened?” I asked, taken aback when I saw a glitter of tears in his eyes.
    “Life,” the balding grocer said stiffly, handing me a roll of toilet paper to shelve.
    Now, following Mr. Haugland to help him check the dairy inventory, I rolled my eyes at Kirk, as if to ask,
Can you believe I’m supposed to
work
?
and he rolled his in sympathy.
    August staggered by in its hot and humid way, but in the air-conditioned cool of Haugland Foods, with its piped-in music and coupon specials, I never broke a sweat, and it didn’t take long before I was feeling my old optimistic self. My mom—whose optimism had taken a beating the last couple of years—was feeling pretty good herself, having several weeks earlier gotten the letter that welcomed her into the Minneapolis school system as a music teacher at Nokomis Junior High. “Look at us, both getting ready for our first day of school!” she said, nudging me away from the bathroom mirror, where I’d been gargling with Listerine until my tonsils were numb. She looked pretty, in a motherly way, but what gladdened my seventeen-year-old heart was an excitement I hadn’t seen in her since my dad died. It was the same look she used to have on her face when they were going out on a date (“It’s dinner and dancing in Grand Rapids, honey!” she’d tell me, doing a little cha-cha step as my dad draped her coat around her shoulders), the same look she’d have when Dad came home from a two-day business trip, always bearing presents: a bouquet of flowers for her and an
Archie
comic book or an issue of
Mad
magazine for me.
    I set down the bottle of mouthwash and, at the same time, we reached out to hug each other, and it didn’t feel weird or dorky or anything.
    “I love you, Joe.”
    “Love you back,” I said, and then before the sap really started to ooze, I hustled out of that tiny little bathroom, reminding her that this year I’d get the donuts.
    After my first