Healthy Shopper Market’s quasi-mountain outpost
Walnut is a city of approximately 40,000, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The interstate neatly cleaves it into two distinct sections, one of which is modern and heavy with strip malls, the other considerably older, with very few developments over the past couple decades. The downtown proper is one mild exception, however, as things have slowly begun to upswing, with the addition of a craft brewery slash restaurant and a trendy coffee shop, to go with charming older institutions such as a timeworn diner and an ancient two screen theater which still shows first run movies.
It’s directly into the middle of all four that the latest Healthy Hippie enterprise will drop. Yet not as a proper, freestanding store, but rather more like an outpost. Directly across the street from the coffee shop, there’s a large indoor market, a plaza where individual businesses rent space, and the HHM squadron is set to occupy a spacious corner stall.
This operation shaped up as 100% Duane’s baby, with not much if any output from anybody else. But if unsure about some of the execution, it sounds from the start like the kind of low-risk enterprise that they have no reason to not at least attempt. Even if one of the correlated moves is that his wife Karen has been hired to run the place, a prospect that fills some with dread — though none of them have yet met her.
On a Sunday afternoon, at a time when this indoor market is closed, Edgar drives over to take a look at the place. He can see nothing outside of a tiny section of their still empty corner space, but this sight is nonetheless a thrilling one. The coffee shop across the street’s still open, so he drifts over to sit at the front window and sip his hot beverage, continue glancing over every so often at the market. It’s still strange to think that he moved down here specifically with the plan of working for this company, knowing almost nothing about it, and it’s thus far proven such a great fit for both sides. His home is even about exactly halfway between Chesboro and Walnut, another strangely perfect piece snapping into place.
Well, it might work, who knows. They are still a week away from beginning to move in. Until then, as always, a flurry of activity remains to sort out on all fronts. A rebranding and a name change are but one such twist, and while technically this doesn’t require much if any extra work for anyone, it does take some getting used to, for it’s difficult in this early going to remember the new moniker: Healthy Shopper Market.
The hot off the presses word from on high is that hippie now sounds outdated, decades beyond its original heyday ended in the 1970s, or the temporary 90s revival. Well, that is probably a step in the correct direction. Although eradicating this plague at the source might appear a higher priority, perchance — a name change can only do so much when the hippie factor is still so highly represented within their workforce. Or if not necessarily all hippies, if that term is a little too specific, Healthy Weirdo Market would certainly fit the bill.
Not that this pertains to merely the employees, not by any stretch. One afternoon Edgar’s down on the floor at Southside, looking up something in one of the aisles, and there’s some vaguely musclebound looking middle aged guy — like a chronic runner or jogger — positively going off on some poor cashier, a recently hired young girl, about how they shouldn’t even be selling such and such product over in the vitamin department, because it says it contains oxygen, which is automatically a lie.
“I mean I tried the stuff, and immediately felt bad, and then when I brushed my teeth in the morning, my gums bled!” he barks, before eventually stomping off.
“What was that all about?” Edgar asks the cashier.
Before she can even answer, though, some incredibly patient woman who’d been stuck in line behind the guy, listening to his pointless rant, jokes, “maybe you shouldn’t brush your teeth so hard?”
There’s also this notorious older woman often found shopping at Palmyra, plainly sixty if a day, whom everyone refers to as Freakzilla. Every cashier must learn not to ask this woman if she would like the senior (50+) discount applied to her order, for she becomes quite nasty, insists she is nowhere near this age. But, hey, she drops a lot of money at this store, and this is certainly her right. Even if so much as looking at her is an exercise in extreme fortitude, with the violent, bright red slash of lipstick running amok over and beyond her lips, but most of all the aggressively short skirt she insists upon wearing all the time. With, more than one highly distressed employee has unfortunately seen enough to verify, never any underwear on underneath.
“I happened to look the wrong way one day,” Corey tells Edgar, still shivering and traumatized as he recalls these events, “just as she was getting out of her car…that was not a pretty sight…”
One must retain a sense of humor about these and all other matters. Though just days earlier, Edgar was clowning around with the bulk employees at Southside, perpetuating the Herbes de Provence stunt, one of those guys is already toast. Jordan had seemed like a fairly laidback and reasonably normal dude, and indeed, perhaps he is. Yet upon discovering what he determined on sight to be “black” mold, in the bulk backstock room, he quit on the spot and instantly fled the premises. Only to return a couple of hours later, accompanied by a friend toting an impressive film rig, as the two of them then shot an exposé in front of the store, with Jordan delivering an extended monologue on his findings. Which they then delivered to Scott Wickander of Inside Scoop, a segment that airs each night on the local evening news. Wickander, in his infinite wisdom, declines to air this piece.
Maybe they are erring in hiring those that seem normal. Not only is it questionable why anyone with that feather in his or her cap would be applying here in the first place, these types never seem to work out. Either they are legitimately a little too normal to cut it in such an archaic realm, or, as has more often been the case, they’re just barely bottling up some outrageous tendencies. The ones laying their cards on the table at the outset have a better track record, by virtue of fitting in better, but also in foisting fewer surprises on everybody else. They have their quirks, which the rest can spot a mile away, and for the most part are able to work around.
Which category a new hire who seems normal will eventually slot into, of those two outcomes, is maybe a toss-up, though inevitably either one or the other. Sean is hired for grocery in Palmyra, and while Edgar makes his acquaintance right away, only a few weeks later does he really has a chance to get to know the guy. Conducting the latest scan audit, he winds up in the same aisle Sean is stocking at that moment, and Edgar is pleasantly surprised to discover they have some points in common — roughly the same age, similar interests in music and beer, even down to paying child support for daughters who are not even a year apart. And he’s thinking this is pretty cool, though it winds up being the second to last conversation they ever have as coworkers.
Not even a week later, Edgar begins his day at Palmyra, for the latest Universal Foods update. He’s barely gotten started and is over in the freezer section when Sean happens across his path, chuckling and giving him a what’s up nod. Then launches unprompted into a tale which sounds completely preposterous, though he’s delivering it with not just a straight face, but in the manner of someone completely shaken up by these events.
“I woke up in the hospital this morning, but have no idea how I got there,” he says.
“What? Really?”
“Yeah…,” he croaks, visibly attempting to piece events together himself, “and then I took a cab straight over here…” Laughs again, then adds that he made his opening shift in time, was even slightly early.
Edgar’s first thought is that he admires this dude’s dedication, if nothing else. But then the next one is to wonder whether this is even true. As Sean begins to pencil in greater detail, however, the scenario is beginning to seem a lot more plausible. He says that after closing down the shop here last night, he drifted up the street to the Redbrick Tavern, a known hipster hotspot here in the shadow of Palmyra College. That the place was packed, and he happened to run into the relatively new hire Brian Prentiss, from the deli, and Corey Brown was there, too. All had arrived separately, yet wound up standing around drinking beer as a trio.
It’s from this point onward that matters become a little fuzzy. He’s aware that some sort of fight broke out, but is uncertain about specifics. His greatest concern, though, is that he feels like he might have started going off on Corey, and that Brian may have attempted to step between them, and gotten caught up in the crossfire, friendly or otherwise. This might have happened, Sean says, although he was really drunk, and it’s possible all three of them were fighting with some other guys.
The answer to this question arrives within the hour, when Corey appears on the scene. “You’re not needed here any more,” he tells Sean, immediately, “you can finish out the day, but don’t come back.”
