V tilted his hip against the counter, and took out a hand-rolled. As he lit up, the old man looked over sharply.
“There’s no smoking in here.”
As V cocked a brow, he went back into that feeble brain—“Ow.”
Payne flared her eyes, all “don’t make me kick your shine again.” Then she turned back to the old guy. “He’s putting it away. And please, keep going.”
Except the old man just stared off into his store. “What happened here…”
“I’m really sorry.” Payne reached out and took his hand. “Can we call someone for you?”
He seemed to come back to attention at the contact, and as he looked at her, he frowned. “You’re back.”
V frowned and cut in quick, “Yeah. We are. Did you see us before?”
“You were here the other night. I came in as you were leaving.”
“What did we look like?”
“Like you.” The old guy seemed confused. “And you were taking things and putting them in the van out back. Two vans.”
Patting his own chest, V said, “We were dressed in black, yes? Did we say anything to you?”
The old man frowned and then weaved on his feet. As he put a hand to his frontal lobe and winced, there was a whole lot of “ding-ding-ding, we have a winner” in V’s head.
Vampires, he thought. And they’d scrubbed his memories.
“Okay,” Payne said, “thank you. You’ve been really helpful. But who can we call for you?”
“My son, Ernie Junior,” the owner mumbled. “He gave me this… to give to people…”
An arthritic hand reached into the pocket of his loose pants and he took out a laminated card. Payne handed the thing to V. Then she just stared at the man.
“I’m really sorry,” she whispered.
V snagged his Samsung and dialed the number. And sometime between the second ring and when a guy answered, he realized what his sister was thinking of doing.
Opening his mouth, he intended to tell her no. Then he looked on the wall behind the cash register, above the displays of those blood pressure cuffs and the blood sugar testers. The lineup of photographs started black-and-white, ended in faded colors, and the lot of it was a documentation of the aging process at work. The constant was the store, while the owner progressed through the eras of his life. Most of the images had been taken out in front, and there were other people in them, men in suits who looked like politicians, women in hats and dresses and cat-eye glasses.
The first and the last pictures were with a woman standing at his side, and like him, she went from somewhere in her early twenties to something north of seventy.
“—hello?” a voice said over V’s phone. “Who’s there?”
At the prompting, V refocused on the man in vivo, the elderly, confused old guy who had sundowner syndrome, and whose dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever it was took him back to his true North, this store.
“I’ve got your father,” V murmured. “He’s at the pharmacy.”
“Oh, God, not again—” There was a muffling, and then the son said to someone in the background, likely his wife, given the female voice, “Dad’s out again… no, I know—I know, we need to get him into a home—”
“We’ll stay with him here,” V cut in. “Until you come.”
The man put the phone back into place at his mouth. “Sorry—thanks. Hey, who is this?”
“Just a passerby. My sister and I saw the back door open and the lights on.”
“He does this a lot. He needs to be in a memory care unit.”
“Like I said, we’ll wait here and keep an eye on him.” God, why was he volunteering to stay in this drama? “Unless you want us to call the cops or something.”