Sam's Legacy by Jay Neugeboren

woman’s mouth, toothless, opened: “You all save green stamps?”
    Her hand moved from his jacket to his wrist, and he felt the bones of her fingers. “No. Not me, but—”
    She smiled, and Sam gazed in at the fleshy red skin in the back of her throat. The woman sat down on an empty Pepsi-Cola case. “I’ll wait,” she said. “Remember, I asked you all first.”
    Sam thought of explaining, but decided not to bother. Maybe she’d be gone by the time he left. He walked around the row of empty shopping carts. The store was crowded—people wheeling their half-full carts up and down the aisles, chattering to one another, standing in clusters at the head of each aisle where the specials were. He checked an aisle (vegetables and juices) for Ben. Cartons of canned goods lined the floor from one end of the aisle to the other. A black kid, a pencil stuck behind his ear, was stamping cans of peas and carrots, clicking out an off-beat rhythm with his purple hand-stamper, clickety-click clickety-clickety-click. Two middle-aged black women, wearing heavy winter coats, were debating the prices on several cans of asparagus. Sam walked past them, and they eyed him suspiciously.
    At the end of the aisle, to the right, salamis and cheeses were hanging from strings above the delicatessen counter. Sam turned left, passed in front of the meat counter, around shoppers comparing packages of cellophane-wrapped beef. In back of the counter were sliding glass partitions, a recent improvement, and sides of cows were hanging behind it from hooks; chickens were moving along on a conveyor belt. Sam heard a bell ring, calling for a butcher. His mouth watered.
    The floor was littered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers. To the right, in the corner of the store, above a display of potato chips, a TV camera moved slowly from right to left, left to right. Sam could remember—he’d been about twelve years old—when the supermarket had opened, the first one in the neighborhood, and how all the women in front of his building on Linden Boulevard had talked afterward about how guilty they felt when they shopped there. He had made some tips, going to the local stores for them—getting a container of milk, a loaf of bread, a half-pound of tomatoes or some soup greens—when they’d been too embarrassed to go themselves.
    Where was Ben hiding himself? Sam checked frozen foods, then the produce department. He turned right, around a display of beer in dark store-brand, no-deposit no-return bottles, then cut around a cornucopia of picnic supplies, paper plates and cups spilling into a green plastic basin.
    â€œExcuse me,” he said, trying to get through a traffic jam.
    â€œSure, darling. Here, let me squeeze myself a little this way….”
    The woman giggled, and Sam slipped past her, past flour, sugar, salt, baking needs, around and into the next aisle, and Ben was there: in paper goods, his cart almost full. Sam stopped. He was surprised somehow to see how short the man was. Ben had a box of tissues in each hand, balancing them, comparing the weights. He glanced toward Sam but didn’t seem to notice him. Hunched up in his raincoat, Ben seemed smaller than ever, his face very gray in comparison with the brown and black faces around him. He was wearing his reading glasses and his nose seemed especially big, hooked out above his thin mouth. Bent over, the man was no more than five-feet-four—he’d shrunk a full inch during the past few years. Sam could see things like that, he could usually estimate somebody’s height to within a half inch. He felt dizzy, and he wondered momentarily if it were possible, gazing this way—half-hypnotized by the noise and the warmth, by the music and the colors—to actually see his father shrink. All but the nose and the ears. They were—Dutch had once pointed this out to him—the only parts of the body that continued to grow