I was standing behind a boy and his mother at the grocery store. The boy was small, maybe in third grade, with long unkempt brown hair and bouncy legs. He was young. His mother, in contrast, looked like someone fighting for life and failing. Her body dropped with a heavy weariness from carrying her son on her shoulders.

Their cart was filled with food bought for a young child, covering the bottom of the basket but ascending no higher than six inches. Peanut butter and jelly, bread, a bag of baby carrots, and a collection of other school lunch necessities. The mother looked at a wall clock and sighed, reaching into her purse and frustratingly pushing things aside in an effort to find her wallet. She found it, pulling out the haggard leather thing and opening it. She looked through the few cards she had, pushing past her credit card and pulling out a government-issued food stamp card. Putting the wallet back in her bag, she held the food stamp card in the palm of her left hand, tucked in her pocket and hidden. She looked around and bowed her head down.

The boy, meanwhile, kept bouncing. He looked excitedly into the basket, seeing the snacks that would soon be tucked into brown paper bags by his mother and hauled to school. The winter was coming, which meant he could hide the bag inside of his coat and prevent his lunch from being stolen by Bobby Baxster. His mother didn’t know about Bobby Baxster.

The mother began unloading the cart, lifting up the same boxes of food that she had been lifting for the past eight years. She sighed again and then glanced at her bouncing boy. He was smiling, and for ever so shortly, a small star twinkled in her eye. Her lips began to curve up, pushing to form a smile until she looked back at the basket and lost the strength to hold her happiness.

The boy turned his eyes from the cart to the candy shelf neighboring the checkout lane, and got on his tippy-toes to reach the chocolate bar he was eying joyfully. His mother pushed her brown hair behind her head, a dusty brown as worn as her skin, and then handed the cashier her food stamp card. She looked to the ground and averted her eyes until the cashier, a college freshmen or sophomore who was sporting a shiny watch, handed it back to her with a fabricated smile.
She began to load up the cart with filled paper bags when she saw her boy with the chocolate. He lifted his head, bouncing, smiling, and saying, “Please, mommy?” as he held up the candy. Her head ever so slightly turned as she read the price tag out of her peripherals. 99¢. She sighed.

The cashier waited, smile pasted on his face, as the mother looked to the ground. Her son kept smiling, kept bouncing, unaware of all that he was subjecting his mother to. She stood there, looking at the boy with poor, wearied eyes. Eyes that had slaved for every dollar she owned, eyes that had loved and been abandoned, dead eyes that wished for new life.

She moved her head and managed a quick glance at me. There was something in that glance, a faint grasp for the approval of someone else, an approval she had been starved of for far too long. And so, she reached into her purse, grabbed her wallet, and pulled out a single dollar bill. The boy smiled, and the twinkle in her eye raged like it had five years ago.