Summer at Fraser’s Mill

Close Encounters of the Grocery Store Kind

O n the way home after school, Grace remembered she needed groceries. She dodged around the other pre-dinner shoppers at the store, trying to remember which foods she needed. She had planned to make a shopping list, but forgotten to do it.

This grocery store, like most places in Los Angeles, was larger and busier than Grace’s family’s store in Michigan. The broader selection of items sometimes led to choice paralysis. Yet, shopping for groceries always reminded Grace of her childhood at Murray’s Grocery. Before becoming a schoolteacher in California, Grace had worked in the store as a teenager and during her summer vacations from college. She had now left the retail job and the small town behind her, but working there had taught her lessons about diligence and responsibility that she appreciated in her teaching career.

Grace was weighing whether to get naan or challah bread when her phone rang. She ransacked her purse and got the phone out before it stopped ringing. It was her older sister Katie.

“Hi, Katie!” Grace tried to position her cart out of the way of other shoppers without dropping her phone. “Did you get my message?”

“About the National Board certification? Yes! I was going to message you back, but I thought you’d be out of class by now and figured I might as well call. Is this a good time?”

Grace laughed. “If you don’t mind me being a little distracted,” she said. “I’m at the grocery store, but I can hear all right, and I’m not in anybody’s way. Can you hear me okay?”

“Oh, good grief, I don’t want to interrupt you when you’re at the store!”

“No, it’s all right, really. We haven’t talked in ages, and later it’ll be dinnertime for me and bedtime for you.” Grace decided on the naan bread and started toward the produce section.

“All right, but please tell me if you need to get off.”

“Absolutely.” Grace held the phone with her shoulder so she could open a produce bag. “How are you doing? And how are Arthur and the kids?”

Katie filled Grace in on her family’s doings. The kids had all had a stomach bug, which had been miserable to handle with everyone sick at once, but Arthur had been able to get off work to help. Now that things were back to normal, Katie had been working on a plan to homeschool her oldest boy, Gabriel, for kindergarten in the fall.

“So tell me about this National Board certification,” Katie told Grace. “Is it a lot of work?”

“Well, I’ve been reading up on it, and it is quite a bit of work.” Grace checked an avocado for ripeness. “You have to complete four components—one’s at a testing center and the other three are all things you send in. The deadline isn’t until next spring, but you have to collect student work and make videos and things during the year.”

“Wow! I thought you were busy already. How are you gonna have time to do all that during the school year?”

Grace might have known Katie would be worried about her taking too much on. “I’ll do it in manageable chunks,” she told her. “I’m planning to get started during the summer. I’m going to work for Shipt, delivering groceries—that way I can work whatever hours I want—and the rest of the time I’m going to read all the National Board stuff and figure out what I need to do for the certification.”

“Excuse me,” a deep voice said. That wasn’t Katie. It was a customer trying to get past. Grace apologized and repositioned her cart in the aisle.

“No, sorry, Katie, I was talking to somebody else,” Grace said into the phone. “What were you saying?”

“I was just wondering what this would do for you,” Katie said. “Is this some extra certification the school wants? It sounds like a lot of work for something that isn’t a graduate degree.”

“Well, it actually would do a number of things for me,” Grace said. “The National Board certification was designed not only to give certification to good teachers, but also to help participants go through the process to become better teachers. I’ve heard it can be a more enriching process than a master’s degree. Also, if you have National Board certification, you automatically get your clear teaching credential in California, which is something I would need to get anyway if I want to keep on teaching.”

Why was the store’s music so loud? She was having a hard time hearing Katie. Grace pressed the phone to her ear and went around a corner to a quieter spot.

“That makes sense,” Katie said. “It just sounds like a lot of extra work the school is suddenly trying to get you to do. You keep talking about all that grading you have to do in the evenings—even on the weekends. You must be working eleven or twelve hours a day. Can’t you ever get a break?”

“If I were a lawyer or something, I’d be working much worse hours,” Grace said. “Don’t worry, Katie. This is something I want to do. I had heard about it before, but I didn’t think I was ready for it. Melanie says she thinks otherwise, so I’m gonna go for it. What’s the point of becoming a teacher if I don’t try to be the best one I can be?”

“I guess you’re right. I’m sorry—I’m not meaning to throw cold water on your plans, I just don’t want to see you get burned out taking on a huge project if you don’t really want to do it.”

Did Grace really want to do it? Absolutely. Melanie had opened a door for her, and she couldn’t wait to go through it.

“Well, thank you,” Grace told Katie. “I appreciate that. I really want to do this, I promise. I think it’ll be really interesting. And it’ll be a nice change of pace doing Shipt shopping and going through the National Board material after school gets out. It’ll be like a vacation.”

She heard squawking in the background on Katie’s end, followed by a shriek.

“I’d better get off,” Katie said. “Gabe and Elijah are fighting over Legos again. I hope everything works out real well with all that certification stuff.”

Katie had never fought over toys, being the mildest of the three siblings. But Grace and their brother Thomas used to fight over Legos all the time. Grace wished Katie luck with the boys, smiling as she hung up.

What did Grace still need to buy? She needed milk and eggs, and something for dinner. Grace headed toward the dairy section.

“Well, if it isn’t Grace Murray.” A cheerful guy’s voice made Grace turn. It was Lucas Taylor, a fellow teacher at her school.

Tall and blond, Lucas looked like he spent a lot of time at the gym. Although he was around Grace’s age, it was his first year teaching. He had gotten his master’s degree in history before coming to the school, where he taught high school history.

“Oh, hi, Lucas,” Grace said. She raised a hand in greeting and continued toward the dairy section.

Lucas followed her. “I come to this store all the time after school, and this is the first time I’ve run into you. Funny how you never run into people you know at the grocery store.”

“I guess that comes with living in the city,” Grace said. “Back home, I knew pretty much everybody who came through the store.”

“You’re from Michigan, right?” Lucas parked his cart next to Grace’s.

“Yes, I am, from a little town nobody ever seems to have heard of called Fraser’s Mill.” Grace held out her right hand and pointed to a spot halfway up her little finger. “It’s around here, west of Cadillac.”

Lucas laughed. “My grandma always does that too—using her hand as a map. She lives in Michigan.”

“Really? Where in Michigan?”

“Charlevoix. It looks like that’s not too far from you. We’ve been a short drive from each other dozens of times, and didn’t know it.”

“It really is a small world.”

“So, do you live near here?” Lucas asked. He put a box of butter into his cart. The cart’s contents looked like he cooked a lot. Vegetables, fresh herbs, and even a whole raw chicken sat in the basket. Impressive. The guys Grace had known in college seemed to live on Hot Pockets, and Grace’s dad and brother were good at grilling and terrible at everything else.

Lucas was looking at Grace expectantly.

“Huh? Oh, yes, my apartment isn’t too far away,” Grace said.

“Wow. I’m even more surprised we haven’t run into each other here before then. Now I know your secret—you come right after class.” Lucas smiled broadly. “I’m not stalking you though, don’t worry.”

Grace laughed. A customer was trying to get to the milk, and Grace moved her cart. “Sorry, I’m in the way,” she said. She turned to Lucas. “Guess I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

Lucas smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

Finally, Grace could finish shopping. With all these interruptions, this was taking forever. She still didn’t have anything for dinner. At this point, she might as well get quick frozen food. She didn’t feel like multi-step meal prep tonight, since she had a mountain of grading from her fifth grade classes. Besides, she wanted to start looking at the steps to become an NBCT.

In the frozen aisle she ran into Lucas again. “Long time no see,” he said. “You know, believe it or not, the frozen food at this place isn’t too bad.”

He wasn’t buying frozen food himself. Was he being helpful or condescending? With Lucas hovering over her shoulder, Grace decided against the frozen pizza and went for a package of beef with broccoli. She liked Chinese anyway, and frying beef with broccoli seemed more like real cooking than making frozen pizza did.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” Lucas said.

“See ya.”

Grace moved on and got a bag of frozen blueberries. If she was going to make beef with broccoli, she needed rice. Rice was in the next aisle.

When she got to the next aisle, there was Lucas again. She wasn’t going to say anything to him this time. In her opinion, saying hello to an acquaintance in the grocery store once was fine. Saying hello twice was probably okay. Saying hello a third time was embarrassing.

“Here we meet again.”

Lucas must not share Grace’s opinion about saying hello in grocery stores. Grace flashed him a smile and continued on. If Lucas would leave the aisle, she’d buy a large container of Nutella.

Internally, she kicked herself. This was ridiculous. She hardly knew the guy. Why was she embarrassed to buy pre-made food and desserts because he was hanging around?

Grace had often found that embarrassment wouldn’t listen to reason. But sometimes one could avoid embarrassment. Grace waited until Lucas had gone around the corner, grabbed the largest jar of Nutella on the shelf, and sped to the checkout, avoiding a near collision with a shopper rounding a corner.