She was eighty six and she still refused to let anyone else buy her groceries. That Saturday the store was full and she only had five things, but her hands were shaking and the wallet would not surface in her bag. The woman behind us sighed at the ceiling, said come on, then pushed her loaded trolley forward and told my mother that if she was too old to manage shopping she should stay home. People turned. When I spoke she rolled her eyes and said she was only saying what everyone was thinking. Then my mother found the wallet, held out her card, and the woman laughed and asked whether we were all really standing there for this.
That was when the cashier looked up. She was about fifty five, and something in my mother’s face stopped her completely. She asked her name. Adeline, my mother said. The register clicked shut. The belt went dead. Nobody leaves, she said, and then she called the manager over and whispered, and he came back with a cardboard box from the office.
Inside were forty years of letters. The cashier’s name was Delphine, and in 1983 she had been eleven and living in a shelter after a fire, and my mother had been the volunteer who came Thursday evenings and taught the children to read. She had written to Delphine every year afterward, on her birthday, until the address stopped working in 1996. Delphine had kept every envelope. She had also kept my mother’s face, which she said she would have known anywhere, at any age, in any light.
The manager comped the groceries and nobody asked him not to. The woman behind us left her trolley in the aisle and went out through the doors and I have never seen her since, and I have stopped caring where she went.
Delphine and my mother had lunch every second Thursday for the next six years. My mother died in February. Delphine sat with us at the front of the church and read one of the letters aloud, the 1989 one, in which my mother had written that she had no doubt at all what Delphine would become.
A stranger decided my mother was an inconvenience in a queue. Someone else looked at the same face and saw the whole of a life. We do not get to choose who is looking, only whether we keep being worth the look.
