Found and Lost

You would think they would be back. You would think that the people who leave their:

discarded future

broken heart

keys to locks that no longer open safety deposit boxes that don’t exist…

… you’d think they would be back.

But humans are confusing. Americans spent $2.5 billion replacing lost items each year and 2.5 days a year looking for things they’ve misplaced. One can almost feel the longing. The yearning. The missing what they once had.

Sunglasses. Wallets. Cellphones. You name an item, and someone has left it on our counter. Keys. Coffee cups. Half-eaten bear claws. We find these “prizes” all over the store. The food goes into the garbage. The flotsam into the lost and found. The broken hearts? In there with the stained hoodies and the teddy bear with a missing eye.

Occasionally, customers forget the bag of whatever it is they’ve just bought. Generally, they’ll return ten minutes later, sheepish, “I think I might have…”

And we hand over what’s theirs.

Sometimes people never come back.

I find this strange. Even after nearly ten years of being a clerk at a small-town emporium. Imagine buying a sweater, a pair of jeans, some new boots, then leaving them at the store and going on with your life as if the purchase never took place. Relegating the items to the void forever. Or until enough time passes that we put the pieces back on the floor again.

But when Charlie came in to talk to me over the counter, I didn’t think he’d leave anything. There wasn’t anything left to leave. We’d been through the hard part of the break-up. We were past the arguing and the tears, the recriminations and the bitterness, the I’m-missing-one-of-my-favorite-socks-can-you-check-the-dryer? (Which wasn’t about a sock at all.) We were past the sinking sensation of watching him walk by with another woman. Or the strange sadness that nagged when I heard they’d gotten engaged.

Charlie came in, and he was good old Charlie. Same old Charlie. The man I’d known since freshman year orientation when we’d had to introduce ourselves with an animal that started with the same letter as our names. So he was Charlie the (wood) Chuck, and I was Sylvia Snake. The orienteer, only a few years older than us and clearly bored, said that fellow students might get confused and want to call Charlie “Walter” or “William” or “Whatever,” and Charlie said he’d answer to anything, and then asked me if I wanted to go get stoned in his VW.

Which I did.

He had a van, unusual for a freshman to have any vehicle, even more unusual for a freshman in the 80s to drive a van covered in Grateful Dead stickers because most of the students were into REM and They Might Be Giants. But Charlie liked The Dead, and he’d put on a cassette and we’d relax on the denim-covered bed and try to blow smoke rings and fail.

People leave their credit cards on the counter. They leave without taking their change. They leave items they bought in other stores. Scarves. Hats. Gloves. Umbrellas.

My boss says, “They’ll be back or they won’t be.” Cindy has owned the store for nearly half a century. She’s not surprised by anything anymore.

Charlie was wearing a surf tee and had on his puka-shell necklace. His jeans were ripped and patched with handkerchiefs. He bantered with Cindy for a minute or two, even though they’d always hated each other, and then turned his attention to me. We’d been something once. We’d been bonfires on the beach, s’mores over open flame, and hotdogs on a stick. We’d been patchouli and homegrown. Sex in an outdoor shower. Kissing in the back row of an arthouse movie theater. Even though it had been three years, I still had a sweater that smelled like him.

People leave crazy things by the cash register. A used diaper. A diamond ring. A stack of mail. A pack of cigarettes with only two left.

Someone came in to ask what time the whales get fed, which is a thing tourists like to ask as if the ocean is their personal petting zoo. Someone wanted to know if we have a public restroom (no) and where the closest one was (we told) and could they use ours anyway (no). Two million tourists come through our town. The septic just won’t hold.

Charlie had stepped to the side and was playing with an array of toys on the counter, stacking the blocks in a tower until they teetered and fell.

I’d heard about the barefoot wedding one beach town over. Their tie-dye nuptials officiated by a guy in a tuxedo-printed tee-shirt. They’d thrown birdseed instead of rice and eaten tempeh out of Tupperware.

Charlie said, “Can you break for ten? Meet me in my van?”

And I knew what that looked like. Me and Charlie, a little low, a little high, his hand in my hair, his lips on my lips. I knew what kissing Charlie felt like, tasted like, did to my whole body. And I knew what walking in on him and Sparky looked like, too.

Charlie was a “be here now” type of guy. I had been there then.

My boss has seen customers leave everything from a snide comment to a rave review, from a wallet with a thousand dollars to a few stray pennies. She says, “They’ll be back or they won’t.” And then there are the men. The men who have played with me for a while only to go on about their business, every so often coming in to the store to see what I’m up to, what I have left in my pocket.

I said, “No, I’m good,” to Charlie who winked and said, “I know you are.”

Now he was Sparky’s problem. Now she and he would get baked in the VW, but maybe one day, at a Dead show, she’d go out for a stick of Thai incense and return to find him in the back canoodling with a sylph in a sundress.

Sometimes they’d be gone, and you know what?

Sometimes they would be back…

But that didn’t mean I’d have to let them paw through my lost and found.