The Checkout Girl by Susan Zettell

soon life became ordinary again and only when a husband came down with the flu and stayed home from work, or a child was having his tonsils out in hospital, only then was the spectre of early death reawakened and the rituals of kinds of kisses and forbidden combinations of food once again noted.
    Kathy had flown up from Brownies to Girl Guides with Glenda White only the week before Mr. White’s death, and her troop formed an honour guard for the funeral. The girls wore their blue uniforms, and poked each other while waiting for the hearse to arrive. Most of them had never been to a funeral and they wondered if the body would smell, if they would get to eat some of the triangular sandwiches with their crusts off, no tuna salad, no one in the Catholic Women’s League had made tuna salad, and the funeral cookies, especially Connie’s melt-in-your-mouth chocolate macaroons, which were famous throughout the Our Lady of Perpetual Hope parish. They wondered if Glenda’s little brother would cry.
    Everyone cried at the funeral mass, Glenda, Glenda’s brother and all the Girl Guides. The men sniffed into clean, pressed handkerchiefs tucked into jacket pockets by wives, just in case. The women cried and cried, especially Mrs. White, who was now a widow. As if it were a disease they might catch, the women said the word “widow” tentatively, quietly, whispering it through their fingers into the ears of their friends. And true enough, before too long, Mrs. White was avoided like the plague by all except for a few brave, immune — or stupid, depending on how you looked at it — souls like Connie. Connie said it was scandalous the way women suddenly didn’t invite Mrs. White to barbeques or potlucks or baby showers. As if she might steal away one of their lumpy, ill-tempered, balding, farting husbands.
    Mrs. White learned to drive, found a job, lost some weight, bought some very nice new clothes and started to have her hair styled once a week in a classic Jackie Kennedy flip. Eventually she found a boyfriend, a gentle well-off bachelor, Basil Burkhardt, an engineer, whom she brought over to meet Connie. She moved with her children to California to be near him when he was hired to raise up by four feet the historic Bridgeport covered bridge in Nevada County to protect it from floodwaters. They never returned to Canada.
    When Kathy’s father died, Mrs. White sent Connie, Kathy and Shelly a lovely card that Connie kept on the windowsill above the kitchen sink for about three years. No doves or lilies or bleeding hands or burning hearts of Jesus, but a peaceful blue-green lake beneath a mountain and a bright sapphire sky, which eventually became covered with dried white potato spritz and warped with rain drops when the window didn’t get closed fast enough during a storm. Or with tears every time Connie took it from the windowsill to reread it. (Kathy always felt it was very Californian to send a non-religious sympathy card.)
    Inside, in neat feminine script, the card said : I’m so sorry, Connie. I understand. It will take time, but you will stop hurting. Though not just yet, and not for a while. Call me if you want to talk. Love, Lizzy. Then she printed her name, Elizabeth (White) Burkhardt, and her phone number in brackets at the bottom. It was the first they’d heard she’d married Basil.
    Kathy drives down Maple Avenue. There’s hardly any traffic, but there is an odour — faint tonight — of wieners. There’s always some smell in Varnum, some worse than others. Rendered and processed meat of J.M. Schneider, Burns Foods, Hoffman Meats, Varnum Packers, Norstern Meat Packers. Hops from Labbatt’s. Alcohol mash from Seagram’s. Rubber from Uniroyal and BF Goodrich. Incinerators. Electroplating, metal product chemicals — General Springs, Budd Automotive, Kuntz Electric, Globe Stamping. Bread from Weston’s. Cookies from Dares. Tanning chemicals from