A bald head with two wings of tufted black hair stretching out from its sides comes in above a Barracuda jacket and a guy who looks like he might not know that nobody wears Barracuda jackets these days and might even think he looks tough in it, like he could be a gangster named “Barracuda Sammy” if only it were still the fifties and the fifties really had been Happy Days. He wanders around the store for a good twenty minutes, poking through magazines in a way I’ve learned over the course of the summer means someone is waiting for a pizza to be ready next door. I’m listening to a Dead Kennedys tape and maybe it’s a little louder than it should be.
On his way out, standing in the doorway, Barracuda Sammy turns, pushes his Coke-bottle glasses up his nose and says, “That music sucks.” I’m not the biggest Dead Kennedys fan, so I don’t really care. It was just the first tape I grabbed before going to work.
But a few minutes later, I watch through the glass as he emerges from next door with his pizza. I follow him with my eyes and see Pete standing outside the window, staring in, and I wonder why he’s just standing there and why he’s come back after leaving for Florida a few days ago. Then it’s not Pete, it’s me, with a beard grown out of control and eyes that look wild even across that distance and dulled by the glass, and something makes sense all of a sudden so I vault myself over the counter and run out the door and chase Barracuda Sammy across the parking lot into the night, yelling, “This is my last night working here!” and I’m not really talking to him as I follow his scrawny frame and the square of steaming, white cardboard visible on either side of his body as far as the church parking lot two doors down. I stand on the sidewalk a minute, looking back at the lights glaring inside the store far away across a black desert of parking lot, at the counter with no one standing behind it, and it almost looks beautiful, like a painting Edward Hopper never got to. Then I head back inside to finish my shift.