Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke Page B

his face. He had a six-pack of Miller
Lite in one hand. He was flexing the other. He glared, not at the
kid, but at the back of the mother’s head. Her focus on the candy
did not waver.
    The kid fell silent. The slight smile
remained.
    None of the shoppers left the aisle,
and now all of them were openly staring at the child and his
mother.
    “ Jesus,” Lori
said.
    A manager appeared.
    “ I think I’ll try Giant
Eagle instead,” Phil said into the phone. “I’m actually starting to
fear I’ll go deaf.”
    “ Good idea.”
    But he didn’t move.
    The manager, a balding man with
spectacles and bad skin, looked only marginally less stressed than
the woman to which he had been summoned. Lost inside a forest green
suit, he resembled a turtle none too enthused about coming out of
his shell.
    “ What’s happening?” Lori
asked.
    Again the kid looked in Phil’s
direction, and the feeling that somehow he was hearing Lori’s side
of the phone conversation intensified. But as there was at least
ten feet separating Phil from the boy and his mother, this was
highly unlikely.
    “ The store manager’s on the
scene,” he told Lori, quietly.
    The manager reached the woman and her
son and joined his hands together before him as if his intent was
not to chastise them but to lead them in prayer.
    “ I’m sorry…Miss?”
    The woman did not move. Phil’s
impression of her graduated from one of pity to concern. Given the
pallor of her skin, dazed eyes, and reluctance or inability to
move, the only thing suggesting that she wasn’t a statue was her
presence there in the middle of the candy aisle. He wondered if
maybe she’d had a stroke.
    “ Miss?” The manager looked
as if he might disappear back inside his suit and scuttle away. “Do
you mind if we have a word?”
    The shoppers were watching, and while
Phil found himself wishing they’d move on, he felt similarly
enthralled.
    “ Miss?”
    The kid spun on a heel to face the
manager. For a brief moment, he just smiled at the man, but just
when the manager started to return it, encouraged perhaps by any
acknowledgment at all, the kid screamed a third time. Startled,
eyes bugging from their sockets, the manager staggered backward and
almost collided with an old woman who had been watching, her
gnarled hands clamped around the handle of her shopping
cart.
    “ I’m going to go,” Phil told
Lori. “I’ll see you at home.”
    “ Just when it was getting
interesting. Pick me up a bag of Dove darks too, will
you?”
    “ Will do.”
    Phil hung up and pocketed the phone.
Up until now, curiosity had kept him rooted to the spot—and clearly
he was not alone in feeling that way—but now he felt uneasy, the
awkwardness and weirdness of the situation registering as a quiver
in the pit of his stomach. And while he was rarely the kind of man
to intervene or contribute to situations he deemed none of his
business, the words were up and out of his mouth before he could
think to stop them.
    “ Maybe someone should call
an ambulance?” he suggested, his words aimed at the manager, who
was gathering himself with great difficulty, his face the color of
a beet.
    And then the mother moved. In a motion
better suited to a machine, she reached out and snapped free of its
hook a bag of sour candy. Her other hand came up and she ripped the
plastic bag wide open. Candy flew on both sides of her. Like a
seagull hovering above a school of mackerel, the kid inspected the
colorful debris, and then dropped to the floor to retrieve
them.
    The woman turned, her gaze like a
lighthouse beam as it swept over the onlookers before settling on
the nervous face of the manager.
    “ Miss, I’m going to have to
ask you to l—”
    With both hands, and hard
enough that her knuckles made a hollow thwock sound as they mashed her upper
lip against her teeth, the woman crammed two fistfuls of the
candies into her mouth.
    As if helpless to do anything but
mimic her, the manager’s mouth dropped open. With the