We always say we’re whatever people, like we’re Bob Seger people because we listened to “Night Moves” four times in a row then twice in the morning, or we’re e-bike people after that weekend with the e-bikes, Garth Brooks people, cleaver people, mini golf people, but when he said we’re co-op people! I said, no, don’t even joke about that, and then I told him about back when I worked there, and how one time when, after catching a white shoplifter, my supervisor came running up to my lane, leant his lanyard over my belt, and said, see? we don’t only get black people for shoplifting here.
My boyfriend’s eyes lifted up in a way that made me think the story was worse than I thought, like maybe we should put down our ginger shots and get out of there. But it’s almost ten years later now, so I shop at the co-op again. I refuse to smile back when that supervisor smiles at me, still full-time, welcoming me to the store, shifting his hips back and forth in the rolling chair behind the customer service desk. It’s fine, not forgiving. You don’t have to forgive anybody for anything. So much racist stuff has happened to me here, the town I choose to live in. The street I choose to work on. The café where I pick up shifts. Last shift alone a man asked me if he could take a photo of me to show to his granddaughter. She looked like me; he wanted her to see. See what?
And then the tall guy who owned the vintage shop across the street came into the café with his mother. He introduced me to her as someone who is obsessed with the presidents, which I am. Her name was Val, so I picked her out the SCRABBLE mug with a V on it for her coffee. When I went back to the kitchen to tell the cook the story of the last time I talked to the vintage shop owner, the cook told me Val was in town because their mutual friend had died. That’s the kind of town this is: everyone knows why you’re in town. Everyone knows the truth about what kind of person you are.
They let it slide because they love the things you sell. About six years ago, outside a cocktail bar, the vintage shop owner and I were flirting. He asked me what was up. I said, nothing really, just I think we have fleas in my apartment, and he said, well I hope you don’t have any fleas in here, then raised both his hands and stuck them into my hair. He held my head, shaking imaginary fleas out of my afro. I know your eyebrows are raised right now. You wouldn’t blame me if I couldn’t forgive him.
But if you were one of my female friends back then, you probably would have said, well I would still fuck him. Or if you lived in town in 2016, and I was sitting on the floor of your living room, each of us smoking our own joint, sending a walking wind-up toy shaped like a human ear back and forth to each other across your low coffee table—if I said, where did you get this walking ear, and you said, at the vintage shop owner’s shop, I would have told you the flea story, but it would only ruin the walking ear for you very temporarily. It would regain its cuteness and its kitsch shortly after I left your apartment. But like I said, no one here knows how to hold a grudge—
Maybe you do. It’s a shame about the flea conversation, especially because the week before, I was actually considering fucking the vintage shop owner—he had found me at a different bar to give me a gift. He lit my cigarette and handed me a plastic bag. Inside were four soft doll heads and a headless doll. The doll was dressed like a boxer, in wristbands and American flag shorts, abs printed across its hairy chest. Each head belonged to a different candidate from the 1992 presidential election. Ross Perot’s little glasses were so cute. Clinton’s face was off-center. The doll’s neck was velcroed so you could rip off and reattach different heads, depending on who you wished would win.
He had stopped me, outside the cocktail bar that night, before putting his hands in my hair, to tell me he found a missing piece of the doll.
He tipped a hundred and twenty percent on his breakfast today. I said have a great day the same way I would have to anyone, without meaning it. He walked his mom to her car; I watched him kiss her hand, her forehead. She drove off and he went into his shop. The front window of the shop was set with an arrangement of unique lamps; my favorite had bulbs shaped like seashells. I had never been inside. The cook called order up, and I went back to serving. The bell rang on the door. The vintage shop owner had come back: with the doll’s missing velcro heart.
He said, I’ve been keeping the president’s heart for you, in a bag, in a drawer, since the last time I saw you. He didn’t say anything like forgive me? before he handed it over, but I heard how the heart sang with it.