Sally Mae Harper had been working third shift at the twenty-four-hour Full Pantry convenience store on Telephone Road, southeast of downtown Houston, for ten years, the last five buzzing about the place on her motorized wheelchair, a necessity brought on by the advance of the diabetes she’d been fighting since middle age. At sixty-eight, she was a fully rounded woman with a pleasant smile; she could walk, but not well, and she feared falling. Her hair didn’t look as realistic dyed black as it once had, but she appreciated the way it brought out her playful dark brown eyes, and she had an eyebrow pencil to make everything match. The store’s owners liked Harper. She was reliable and cheerful, and the customers chatted happily with her when they stopped in. The owners were so fond of her, in fact, that when Sally took to the wheelchair, they hired a handyman to lower a section of the checkout counter eighteen inches so she could ring up orders sitting down.
One added benefit to the arrangement, in Harper’s opinion, was that the lower counter put her at kid level. She loved children, always had. Would have had ten of her own if her body had held up. The way it was, she’d given birth to six, four boys and two girls. The problem was when they became teenagers. Up until then, she got along with them fine. Once they grew up, the relationships cooled. As adults, none of the six talked much to her anymore. All of them had families and jobs and not enough time for Sally, but she didn’t hold that against them. To her great disappointment, Sally saw her grandchildren rarely. But none of it changed the way she felt about the little ones. If she could have, she would have given up on the adults and spent all her time with the young ones. “You should have been a kindergarten teacher,” she told herself often, and never doubted that it was true.
“What’re you looking for?” Harper asked the man, a tall, good-looking guy, who stood at the counter holding a little boy’s hand. He was a beautiful child, light brown hair and round blue eyes. She smiled at the boy and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Jo—,” the boy started.
“Please, don’t talk to my son,” the man said, flashing the boy an angry frown. “That’s not what we’re here for.”
“Sorry,” Harper said, thinking the man was kind of a snooty type, the kind who must have thought he was better than everyone else. Why folks had to treat other folks that way was something Harper never understood. Wasn’t everyone in this mess called life together? She thought about that and wondered how hard it would be for people to just show a little common courtesy. Glancing at the boy, Harper smiled again, but this time she didn’t talk. She noticed that the boy didn’t have any shoes on, and his bare feet were dirty. The man’s shoes were filthy, too. A glance at the floor, and she realized they were tracking clumps of mud and dirt through the store.
“Would you point us to your restroom?” the man said. “My son would like to use it.”
The man looked like a snooty type of person, too, Harper thought. He had the face for it, those small features, a well-bred-looking nose, one he’d spent his life looking down at folks, she figured. Now he was going to walk through the store with his grubby shoes and get the floor all dirty, then probably wouldn’t even buy anything. She thought about saying that to the guy, then looked at the little boy again. He looked tired and frightened, and she didn’t have the heart to make his night any worse. “Back at the corner there, next to the milk and margarine,” she said, pointing. She frowned at the man, irritated, then remembered he was the customer and she needed him to come back and buy groceries, or she’d be out of a job. Despite her irritation, she smiled, showing off the gap between her two upper front teeth.
“Thank you,” he said, more polite this time. “Do we need a key?”
“No,” she said. “It’s open.”
The boy and the man shuffled off toward the back of the store, and Harper thought nothing of it. She had cigarettes to stock. With folks nervous about the hurricane, water, ice, soda, chips, canned goods, beer, wine, and cigarettes were selling well, especially the alcohol and cigarettes. The store was already out of bottled water and ice and running low on everything else, although now it appeared that maybe the rush was over. Most folks were apparently done stocking up and settling in for the next day, less than twenty-four hours before the hurricane was scheduled to hit.
Thinking about how she had her own supplies well in hand at home, Harper turned her back on the cash register and stood up briefly to slip a few packs of generic menthols into the display’s top rack, when she noticed something in the round mirror, shaped like a hubcap, over her head, the one that reflected the right back end of the store, near the restrooms. The man was talking to the little boy, and the kid was crying.
“Nice father,” Harper jeered under her breath. “Not any nicer to his son than he is to other folks.”
But there was something about the way the man was talking, cool and collected, even though the kid looked terrified. It was then that Harper saw it, when the man opened his jacket to show it to the kid, tucked in his belt, something that looked like a gun.
It’s a robbery, she thought. That psycho brought his kid with him to rob the store!
Harper remembered reading about something like that once or seeing it on television. A dad in New Mexico brought his ten-year-old daughter to a store when he robbed it and then told the clerk he needed the cash register money to feed the girl, as if that made a hill of beans difference. Harper thought if the boy needed food, she’d be happy to give him some. She didn’t want the kid to starve. But when somebody pulls a gun, there’s no explanation that makes it right.
Harper turned and sat back down in her chair, then hit the release and opened the cash register. She wasn’t taking any chances. She pulled out two torn dollar bills stapled together from the far left compartment in the cash drawer. Instantly, the store filled with the blare of the alarm. She watched as the man rushed toward her, carrying the boy. By then, Harper had grabbed a twelve-gauge shotgun from under the counter and cocked it.
“What’s that?” the man asked. “What did you do?”
“I called for help, because you’ve got a gun!” she said, staring at him down the barrel of the shotgun. “You better listen up. I know how to shoot this thing, and the police are on their way. They’ll be here any minute. You just stay put and don’t you even think about giving this old lady any trouble.”
“You stupid bitch,” the man said as he backed toward the door.
“Get back here, you piece of white trash,” Harper said, fuming. “You’re waiting for the cops.”
The man kept moving gingerly back, holding the boy in front of him as a shield, watching her, calm but focused on Harper and her shotgun. “You’re not going to shoot a little kid, are you, lady? You wouldn’t do that.”
The boy looked petrified, his eyes big and his flesh pale. Harper gulped, thinking about what to do. She could shoot the guy and try to miss the kid, maybe wound the man enough so that he couldn’t leave, but what if she missed? Here she was, nearly seven decades old, and despite what she’d told the man, Harper had never pulled the trigger of a gun, wasn’t sure she could, and certainly wasn’t confident that she knew how to aim the shotgun well enough to hit the right target. Feeling helpless to do anything else, she held the shotgun and watched as the man backed through the door. Before it swung shut behind them, the boy shouted at her.
“Joey!” he screamed. “My name is Joey Warner!”
At that, the man’s free arm swung out from around the boy, and too late Harper realized he held the gun. “Lord help me, don’t shoot!” she screamed, but by then the man had aimed at Sally Mae Harper’s chest and fired.