Unexpected Hero in the Bagging Area
First posted in 2024
Set sometime after His Mossy Boy
Summary: Deputy Kyle just wants to go home after work, but gets stuck in line at the grocery store. Gen.
Tags: toxic parents, transphobia, homophobia, beings phobia, I guess?
Note: This is set like, 2017-18, so weed is legal in California but Kyle (and Ian) are still pissy about it and Martin being so high all the time, lol.
Sorry but Zarrin does seem like someone who would chat in the bathroom.
The grocery store—the regular grocery store, and not the smaller organic, independent one where Schmitty did most of his shopping—had been called Big Tom’s when Kyle had been a kid.
Then it had been bought out by a chain, as if a corporation had thought the area around Everlasting was going to blow up into a boomtown again the way it had in the timber and fishing days.
And for some fucking reason, that chain had recently invested in one lane of two self-checkout machines.
Of those two machines, one seemed to always have Out-of-Service flashing across the screen, and the other currently had Deborah O’Hare standing in front of it with a bewildered expression and a cart full of unchecked groceries.
Kyle personally kind of thought self-checkouts were meant to be more like the Express Lane, for quick in-and-out purchases, but nothing said a person couldn’t bring a fully loaded cart to one.
But if Deborah had been trying to save herself time, it hadn’t worked, since the machine was robotically complaining about unexpected items in the bagging area.
There was nothing in the bagging area.
Nothing but air anyway.
But that was not a problem Kyle could fix no matter what kind of big eyes Deborah gave him.
She needed a store manager or something.
At least an employee who gave a shit.
It was the kind of thing Kyle considered bringing up the next time Schmitty started talking about how automation was supposed to be benefitting humans, not replacing them in a world which didn’t offer a laid-off store employee any sort of income to make up for the machine now doing their job.
To be fair to Schmitty, though he did read too much, Everlasting was not the kind of town where plenty of jobs were available.
A grocery clerk might expect to work in this store their whole lives, and be more or less okay with it if the cost of living in Everlasting didn’t go up.
But since they still needed an employee to help out people at self-checkout, Kyle didn’t think that job was in trouble.
At least not yet.
Maybe Kyle was thinking about it because he wasn’t at all sure what was going on within the Sheriff’s Department.
He didn’t think most of the other deputies knew either.
The old sheriff left, there was no acting replacement, the town council wasn’t saying anything, and some of the old guard deputies who had been fans of the sheriff had left too, or were planning on it.
The entire Department might get the axe, leaving the town in the hands of the Highway Patrol, or be downsized and defunded.
Maybe Kyle would end up working here too, or moving out of Everlasting like so many did.
All because the last sheriff was scared of a dragon.
Because all of them were—a tiny little fruit of a dragon at that.
Not that it was Kyle’s business.
But he supposed that was what happened when the council had appointed some out-of-towner to the job, who had then hired his friends.
Schmitty liked that they were scared.
But Schmitty was a weird guy, always had been, even back in elementary school when he had been just Ellis who liked Ninja Turtles, and comics, and making friendship bracelets with the girls.
Had gotten him some girlfriends in middle and high school though, those bracelets.
And his taste in comics had been pretty good, Kyle could admit that now.
Kyle’s ma still thought Schmitty was weird but also brought in cookies for him and the others when she brought some in for Kyle.
Yeah, so Schmitty was okay, and probably right that self-checkout might be meant to help people but it wasn’t helping anyone as things were, because the way things were was shit.
Kyle just didn’t see what they were supposed to do about.
Like how Kyle was in uniform because he’d gotten off work and hadn’t wanted to linger at the station to change, so Deborah wanted him to help, but what he was supposed to do? He didn’t work here.
There was only one employee he could even see.
And yeah, it was after the pre-dinner hour grocery store rush time, and hardly the height of tourist season where more employees would be needed, but still, there should have been somebody else in the store.
For safety reasons if nothing else, and maybe Schmitty was right on another point and the big chain had started cutting back on employee hours because of the self-checkout, and it really fucking sucked that Kyle couldn’t even stop in the store after work without worrying about the politics of the working class now.
Damn it, Schmitty.
The store’s single employee did not seem to give a shit about politics, or the waiting customer at the self-checkout lane, or Kyle standing there looking around with a basket full of groceries.
Although Kyle would bet she could hear the machine complaining even from two checkout lanes over.
Or maybe she would have if she and the customer in front of her would stop talking for a few seconds.
Thinking that made Kyle take another look toward the only open checkout lane and the employee and customer in question. Then he said, “Ah, shit,”
out loud—but under his breath—because he knew why Deborah had tried her luck at self-checkout.
He reconsidered the items in his basket: oranges, apples, yogurt, blueberries, bananas, and peanut butter for his various morning smoothies—and fuck Forrester for thinking it was funny that Kyle liked smoothies anyway—and then a frozen pizza Kyle could never tell his ma about, but he was not in the mood to cook right now. He reconsidered the organic store too, even if he thought half the employees were high or actively selling weed on the job and it took a lot of effort to pretend he didn’t know that, but the organic place was probably closed by now.
Then he sighed and took his basket and got into the line, hoping that his presence would at least prod the cashier and chatty customer to finish up their conversation and then everyone in the store could get back to their lives and the shit they had to do.
The two talkers didn’t so much as twitch in his direction, even though Kyle had to reach near them to get the little divider to put between his stuff and what the bitch—what the lady was buying. Not to pry, but he felt like instant coffee, paper towels, and a bottle of wine should have been rung up by now.
“Terri Bonét had the same thing happen to her,”
the cashier said, holding the customer’s package of toothpaste without scanning it or putting it into a bag or anything. Annalee Wadowski had been working there for about a decade. Her sister was still a teacher at the high school. Her brother ran the gas station in Stapleton. She knew Kyle’s mom. She knew everybody. Everlasting was a small town and everyone had to get groceries.
“She said she came home one day and Kevin was gone. He’d packed up and left for the city, and not even for college, can you imagine? Terri says there was no way his grades were good enough for that, though she has no idea what he’s even doing there. Won’t take her calls, has her blocked all over the internet—her husband too, although what that man could have done to upset him is a mystery to me. He’s only known Kevin for a handful of years, honestly.”
“They get ideas from TV and social media,”
her friend remarked with her nose in the air. “Suddenly their parents are the cause of everything wrong in their lives. There’s no reasoning with them once that happens. It should be banned, I tell you.”
“Social media?”
Annalee wondered, finally scanning the toothpaste. She didn’t pick up another item. “I see my cousin’s kids on there. Well, I did until my cousin took the pictures down. Said she didn’t want her kids’ images being shared with strangers. Strangers! As if I don’t know every one of my friends.”
“That’s what I mean,”
Rachel Dyer continued. Kyle had never actually heard her talk, not like this, but wondered if her superior tone would have bugged him so much if he hadn’t encountered her before. Probably. Some people were just natural born Pains in the Ass.
He emptied his basket onto the conveyor belt and then dropped his basket onto the stack of them, where it fell into place with a loud, plasticky clack that made both women glance at him.
Rachel Dyer, the bitch of Tanglewood Drive, paused at the sight of his uniform, then looked into his face and exhaled in either relief or annoyance before turning away. He didn’t think she recognized him, but that wasn’t what had spooked her anyway; for a second there, she’d thought Kyle had been one of the other deputies. One specific deputy.
“People go online and they read things, and they find groups that reinforce all these wrong ideas they have,”
Rachel Dyer continued to Annalee, neither of them seeming to care that there was now a line. “The people on the forum I visited said that’s common. Kids and the young especially find these places online where everyone agrees with them and soon, they’re moving out or cutting their parents off so they can better fit in with their groups. Like cults.”
She hummed and leaned in closer to Annalee. “Though in Everlasting, they don’t even need the internet. Everyone knows where they go. They just won’t say it out loud because they’re intimidated by that “boy” dragon.”
Boy was in air quotes so heavy that even Kyle’s ma would have noticed, and she was the kindhearted sort of lady who didn’t get sarcasm. Schmitty would have said Rachel Dyer had made boy into a slur. Schmitty said a lot of things were slurs, or code for slurs.
Forrester would have just called Rachel Dyer an asshole.
Kyle was kind of with Forrester on that one. But either way, Kyle wasn’t going to fuck the dragon, so why the fuck would he care if he was a boy or a girl? Though he wasn’t sure he’d want to piss next to him in a men’s room, not because of gender issues or whatever, but because that Zarrin Xu seemed like someone who’d wanna chat in there.
Maybe no one had ever told him you were supposed to go in, do your business, and leave, no talking and no eye contact. Boys were supposed to learn that early on. Maybe dragons didn’t use public restrooms. Or maybe Zarrin’s parents were like this bitch in front of Kyle and couldn’t do basic parenting shit.
“Where did you find your group?”
Annalee asked. “Maybe I can tell Terri about it so they can help her figure out why Kevin won’t talk to her.”
“He really didn’t say a word?”
Rachel Dyer tossed her head. “Isn’t that typical? It’s either fantasies and nonsense or nothing at all, because you live in the real world and they don’t.”
“Well, he wrote her a letter,”
Annalee admitted. “She said it was a pack of lies and things he exaggerated. She said now he won’t speak to her just because she wouldn’t pay for him to take trips up north to Seattle when he was younger—that’s where his grandparents live on his dad’s side. Of all the trivial reasons to cut off a mother.”
Kyle cleared his throat. Loudly.
Annalee gave him a single glance. Rachel Dyer shook her head—not at him, at this Kevin kid.
“See what I mean? One little mistake and now her son won’t talk to her. His friends probably convinced him that it was abuse because of a train ticket.”
“He can talk to his grandparents on the phone. That’s what I told her. He probably just wanted to go on the trips to get out of babysitting. Kids always try to get out of their responsibilities like that. Claim it’s… what’s that word? Parentification,”
Annalee rolled the word around in her mouth like she was trying to keep it off her tongue, “to expect him to help out with his stepsiblings after school. We just called that being in a family when I was young.”
“That’s what they do now, on those sites, in certain coffee shops.”
Rachel Dyer wasn’t hissing like a snake but Kyle half expected her to. “They make up words to try to get people on their side. The people on my forum said it’s so common, you wouldn’t believe it. Suddenly the parents are the villains. If anyone is a villain here, it should be my useless ex-husband who didn’t even teach Martin how to be man before he left. But no, somehow, I’m the one who deserves to be ignored.”
Kyle looked over and met Deborah’s eyes across the distance. He wondered how much she heard. Probably all of it since Kyle could still hear the self-checkout machine complaining. Her expression was pinched. She was older than Kyle by a few years, which meant older than Martin Dyer by even more, but nearly everyone in town went into Everlasting Cuppa at some point, so everyone knew or knew of Martin Dyer.
He was an awkward, friendly nerd with his head in the clouds—of weed smoke, usually. That was how Kyle would have described him before all this. Maybe he would have noticed the red hair. Maybe he would have noticed the way the kid smiled at everyone. Maybe he would even have noticed the way the kid stared at the other barista. But that’s all. Just a friendly kid who smiled when he saw you. Now, of course, people knew a lot more about Martin Dyer than that. But most of them still would have described him as friendly. Maybe even sweet.
“Well, you know,”
Annalee was suddenly, delicately, slowly, examining Rachel’s items without managing to scan any of them, “he’s still there, working in that shop. You could just go in.”
Kyle coughed into his hand. This was also ignored. But he personally would not walk into a coffee shop frequented by Ian Forrester, known prick. Not if he was someone Ian Forrester very clearly did not like. Especially not if an employee of said coffeeshop was the one person on God’s green earth capable of making Ian Forrester stop pretending to be nice—which still wasn’t all that nice—and look ready to commit murder with his bare hands for the chance to defend them.
Him. Not them. Him . A boy. A man, even if he dressed like a teenager. He’d said so, or something like that. Something about fairies and genders and Zarrin Xu.
But that really wasn’t any of Kyle’s business. Martin Dyer made Forrester less of a prick and that was all Kyle cared about.
That and his smoothies, and getting home at some point tonight, and maybe asking around with his friends in Stapleton to make sure the problem with this Kevin kid had been shitty parenting and not criminal parenting. There were still kids in that house from the sound of it. Somebody had to.
“I wouldn’t step inside that shop if you paid me,”
Rachel Dyer insisted. “Nothing but,”
she lowered her voice, which was a small surprise, “queers and visiting beings now.”
Or that frowning barista had booted her ass out the last time she tried. Or the hot girl who worked in the afternoons had ripped her a new one. That girl would do it too. She had a mouth on her and she was Martin Dyer’s friend. A good friend. The kind to pick up a troubled kid in the rain and then chew out Kyle for no real reason except she was worried about her friend and mad at this bitch, and had nowhere else to direct her anger.
Pissed off and wet was a good look on her. Too bad she’d hated Kyle on sight. She’d probably like Schmitty’s type more. The read-books type.
Which reminded him, he had one of Schmitty’s mystery paperbacks in his locker and he needed to give it to Charlene, who was waiting for the next one in the series. Pretty solid mystery, but a lot of beings characters for some reason. Not the worst, but Kyle could have done with more werewolves and less fairies.
“No, they’ve thoroughly indoctrinated him. I just have to wait for him to come to his senses—not that he ever had much sense to begin with.”
Rachel Dyer made a tiny, huffy, sniffy sort of sound, like a snotty noble lady in a PBS drama. Kyle opened his mouth, then shut it and decided to read the label of a pack of gum. “Got that trait from his father.”
“Martin really didn’t say anything? I’ve tried to talk to him, but he goes through the self-checkout now when he comes in.”
Annalee clucked her tongue. “Same with his friends, except for the dragon. He comes through my line. He looks at me.”
She said that in a whisper.
“Oh, Martin said some things the last time I spoke to him.”
Rachel Dyer was suddenly very concerned with getting her wallet from her purse. “Everything I do is wrong now, let me see: he’s mad because I don’t trust the dragon and because I don’t approve of his choice of friends. He wasn’t making sense, believe you me. Drinking, and probably because of that Jessica Bartlett who has been trash her whole life. Almost nothing Martin said was clear. Started making accusations because I wouldn’t let him clean the gutters in the middle of a rainstorm, and—”
Kyle snorted a laugh so loud that Deborah let out a startled squeak.
“Excuse me?”
Rachel Dyer turned on him as if she’d noticed someone was in line behind her after all.
Kyle shook his head. “I was gonna stay out of it, really. No matter what a piece of work you are, but—you don’t remember me, do you? Maybe you’d already shut the door before I got out of the car. Maybe you blocked it out like you apparently blocked out all the stuff your kid did say to you. Who knows? But I was there when you left your son in the freezing winter-in-Everlasting rain like hypothermia isn’t a thing. Okay? If you want to make yourself the victim to Annalee here, it’s not my business, but I don’t like people lying to my face.”
“Who do you think you are?”
Rachel Dyer demanded, lifting her chin like she was about to call his manager. Kyle didn’t have a manager at the moment, but if he did, it would be either Schmitty or Forrester and he wondered how that would turn out for her.
Nonetheless, he reminded himself of what his ma would say about trying to be respectful to his elders, which was to try to be… at least at first.
“Well, I’m the guy who’s been in line behind you for way too long, first of all.”
Kyle gestured to his groceries and rapidly thawing frozen pizza. “And secondly, I’m the deputy your neighbors called to come help your son when you wouldn’t.”
His voice might have gone low and a little rough, but he was tired and it had been a long day. “I’m the one who got him warm, and the one who had to hear him say that his mom didn’t love him. Can you believe that?” Kyle turned to Annalee, who looked, to use an old expression, poleaxed. Kyle didn’t think he was supposed to out people, according to, like, every online discussion and also Schmitty, but it was a small town and everyone knew anyway. These two hadn’t said it but they’d been talking around it for the past ten minutes at least. “He tells me he came out to her and that she didn’t love him. Those words exactly: My mom doesn’t love me .”
It was inconvenient how clearly Kyle remembered those words. Out of the whole encounter, that’s what stayed with him aside from Martin trying to stick up for Forrester, as if Forrester needed protecting. Forrester looked like he was carved from a fucking sequoia and yeah, okay, he had feelings like anybody else, but if someone hurt him, he would make damn sure they were bleeding too.
Maybe Kyle remembered those details because Forrester was like that, and Martin was a skinny kid who’d cried in the back of Kyle’s car, and yet Martin had fought for him.
That was love, maybe. A truer love than whatever Kyle’s sister had gotten, or even Schmitty, for all his girlfriends in school.
Kyle pushed out a breath. “He said he told her about himself,”
and he’d been so fucking scared even saying it to Kyle. So drunk he’d fallen over and still he’d been terrified. “And she closed the door and left him there on the verge of passing out. He probably would have drowned in a blocked street drain or frozen to death on the sidewalk if her neighbors hadn’t called me and then his friend hadn’t come to get him. Un-fuckin’-believable.”
That was loud. Kyle shook his head again. “My sister got pregnant at eighteen and dumped at nineteen, yet my extremely Catholic mother took her in and turned my room into a nursery for the kiddo.” Kyle loved his niece but was also very happy that he’d already been out of the house by then. “My ma would never pull the shit that you did. Martin might be your kid but you sure as hell are not his mother.”
The back of his neck itched.
Kyle turned from Rachel Dyer’s reddening face to Annalee’s round eyes before spinning around toward the self-checkout lane, where Deborah, the store’s assistant manager, and—goddamn it—Schmitty, were standing together and staring at Kyle like he’d grown two heads and both of them were the Virgin Mary’s.
“Fuck off, Schmitty,”
Kyle said preemptively. “I’m just trying to get my stuff and go home.”
“Forrester is going to kiss you on the mouth,”
Schmitty called out, grinning like an elf—not a real elf. Like the ones in old movies who always seemed to be wearing tights and funny outfits.
“ Forrester .”
Rachel Dyer hissed at last. Kyle felt vaguely as if snakes should be insulted. Nothing malicious there; they were just snakes. Rachel Dyer was a lying bitch.
Kyle looked at her, then at Annalee, who was scanning Rachel Dyer’s items without looking up. Kyle liked to think she was embarrassed at getting caught believing obvious lies but it was probably just that the assistant manager was there.
He looked back to Rachel Dyer. “Your total is up.”
It was. She turned toward the card reader with a distracted frown.
Kyle risked a glance to Schmitty, who, of course, hadn’t moved an inch even though Deborah was finally scanning her groceries.
“Forrester kisses me on the mouth, I’m gonna punch him.”
That was a shout directed at Schmitty. Kyle suspected hitting Forrester would be like punching granite, but he’d do it. He turned back to Rachel Dyer and Annalee, both of them hurriedly packing Rachel’s things into a canvas bag. “I’d leave him alone if I were you,”
he said, voice lower so only the two of them would hear. “Forrester. Or his boy.” He kind of enjoyed how Rachel Dyer flinched at that. “It wasn’t my business until you made it my business. Still isn’t, really. But I’d steer clear of Cuppa altogether. If your son wants to talk to you,” Kyle couldn’t imagine why, “he knows where you are. But if you go in to his workplace and cause a scene, they’d have every right to demand you leave.”
Or have her removed.
He left it unsaid like one of Schmitty paperback werewolf detectives would have.
Weres apparently used body language instead of words sometimes, if the book author was correct, anyway.
There was a wolf in Everlasting now, but Kyle wasn’t about to walk into Cuppa to ask him werewolf questions.
Zarrin Xu went in there.
Forrester went in there.
That scowling barista Joe was in there.
They weren’t like whatever the hell Rachel Dyer was implying, but Kyle wasn’t taking any chances. He’d walk in there and walk back out with a limp wrist or something.
And yeah, he wasn’t even worried about what Schmitty would say about that. It was what Forrester would say about that, which would be an ice-cool, “If all it takes to make you wanna fuck men is to walk into a coffee shop, then I don’t think the coffee shop is the problem, Kyle.”
With his eyes bluer than the bay and his hair looking like Superman’s.
Fuck that guy.
Kyle was about to blame every weird thought on Schmitty, his late night, and his hunger, when Annalee whispered something to Rachel Dyer and then came around to begin scanning Kyle’s groceries.
Fucking finally.
He was gonna go home, eat his fucking pizza, wash his blueberries with lemon juice and water so they wouldn’t get moldy, watch some porn—of fucking women , fuck off, Forrester—and then go to bed and forget all about this.
“Wait, Schmitty!”
he called out before Schmitty could head off to buy whatever it was he came in for. “Do you have the next book in the series on you? I wanna know who the killer is!”
The End