Errands

She was walking alone on the side of the road, clutching a brown paper bag to her chest. The bag was filled to the brim with potatoes and carrots and stashed further down were cans of soup, a bottle of shampoo, a de-Icer and two boxes of sheer white pantyhose. She could only get away with wearing them undernearth black slacks, the kind so opaque and formless that her legs looked like two exclamation points. Her legs were not her best assets.

Two cars passed her by; a green minivan who kept on going (she could hear a Top 40 song filtering through a cracked window), and a blue sedan. The latter pulled right up next to her, and a man in a suit comes out and holds his hand out to her. He says "Ma'm, would you like a ride?" and she stops walking for a bit. She shifts her weight to her left foot to scratch her calf with her right foot. Then she responds, "I live a quarter mile down the road. I'll be fine." The man starts to walk towards her, his arm still outstretched. "That bag looks heavy," he says. "Can I at least help you carry it?" She starts to walk too, but she passes by the grateful man, telling him over her shoulder, "I've had worse burden on my shoulders. Try living in a double-wide with no heat in the dead of winter, and you hear the wind howling outside while you try to sleep."

The woman continues walking. She hears the man get in his car, slamming the door. As he passes her, he honks his horn, and as she turns to look, he flashes his middle finger at her. He couldn't have been a day under forty.

Further down the road, she stops again. She sets the bag on the gravel, and sets herself on a misbegotten tire. She massages her feet. Her calves had ballooned, bulging against her tan trouser socks, a run beginning behind her right ankle. She shifts her attention, fingering the run, when a dog materializes behind her and licks her hand.

"Sherman!" a boy's voice says. He throws himself at the dog, disturbing the woman in the process. "It's quite alright," she chuckles. "Ever had a man with herpes sores take you in his mouth? I've had worse."

The boy looks at her for the first time, unafraid but aware of himself now. "What's in the bag?" he asks. "Nothing that would interest you, boy." she says. The boy responds "I don't want anything, I was just being polite."

"Polite!" the woman chortled. "When you see your son of twenty-two years sneak out the back door with your grandmamma's wedding ring under his tongue, then you can talk about being polite."

The boy finally scampered away, leaving the woman alone once again. The bag, once back in her arms, had somehow gotten heavier, and the last few yards to her house were painful. She knew she would have to reach for the bottle underneath her bed for comfort, wrapping one leg around a cool pillow, pushing in at the spot behind her knee as if it were a dam to hold back the pain.

It wasn't until she was reaching for the front door that the brown paper bag finally collapsed. She stepped on a couple of carrots and a potato. The de-Icer rolled away, and she imagined it was heading underneath the trailer, where one would find a can of AquaNet hairspray and a tube of lipstick in a coral shade. The cans of soup were damaged, but the woman considered that she was lucky none of it fell on her feet. That, and her pantyhose were left intact and, therefore, still very useful.