They gave me this card to use, she says, but I don’t know how all this works.

Gleaming smile, glowing skin unfurrowed by years of troubles and worry, peaches-and-cream even under the institutional blue-bright light of the food pantry.

It’s my first time here. 

I like to be the one to take these first timers around, and the others usually let me—I’ve been here the longest, even have a gold-tone pin with 15 YEARS written on it though I don’t ever wear it. So I tell her we’re gonna take this shopping cart right here and go through together. I’m Joan. 

I’m Darla. Nice to meet you. I just got out of prison. 

Well, Darla, I say, not batting an eye, you’re gonna pick whatever suits you from each section and I’ll bag it up for you as we go along. Let’s get started right over here with the canned vegetables, any nine selections; a sweep of my hand like some old Vanna White wannabe. 

Any nine, she repeats. 

I hold the plastic bag ready while she deliberates, and then she doesn’t just drop her choices in like some shoppers do. No, she places them inside as carefully as she can, and goes with a nice variety too, takes the corn, collard greens, tomato sauce, green beans. We’re on to dry goods next (rice, spaghetti) then the soup section, which does include the packets of ramen, I explain, which sometimes people miss seeing. 

I’ll pass on the ramen with another big smile, places two of each kind of soup inside the bag (tomato, vegetable, chicken noodle) with their cheerful red-and-white labels showing through. Darla handles the plastic shoebox full of tiny-sized bottles of toiletries like treasure, finally comes up with a body wash that smells of vanilla and citrus and a spice we can’t identify. Me with another flappy-armed wave at the boxes of milk and jugs of grape juice, three kinds of off-brand cereals, oatmeal: and here’s your breakfast options. Darla weighs a bag of steel-cut in her hand, hesitates, puts it back and exchanges it for a round canister. 

If that’s okay? I like this kind better. 

Oh, and I forgot, there’s grits too.

Grits, she echoes, and I can tell by her tone she’s had a lot of these in prison. A guard got mad at me because I like to put butter and sugar on them. Told me sugar don’t go on grits. 

Well, we put sugar in our cornbread, don’t we? We like what we like. Hmmph, I say. 

Hmmph, she says, laughing now, and I hope my heart doesn’t break completely open right now, right in front of all these rows of stacked canned protein. Any eight: salmon, three tunas, chicken, chili without beans, Boston baked beans, peanut butter. Ten pounds of fresh meat to consider and tally up: a whole chicken (four pounds), fish (two pounds), ground pork and ground turkey in one-pound packages. She’s not afraid of cooking, I can tell, and she says her mama taught her. She marvels at the purple mesh bags of sweet potatoes, the shiny green apples, almonds in crinkly cellophane. And the eggs! Seven dollars now in the HEB! Seven dollars! I know, it’s awful! She considers what all she might do with the waxy yellow blocks of cheese. 

I was in for two years, Miss Joan. I made some bad choices before. 

We all make some bad choices, some of us just don’t get caught. I could tell her stories. She’s sifting carefully through the meager produce there is left on this Friday afternoon, happy to take some of everything, the spaghetti squash others mistook earlier for discolored melons, wrinkled red bell peppers the perfect size for stuffing, we agree, and even a handful of those misshapen carrots that look like the gnarly fingers of a giant. 

Now, all too soon, we are done, hon! You just drive around back and someone will load all this in your car. What color car are you driving today? 

I lost my license because I didn’t take care of some traffic violations. I’m with my mom, she brought me, blue Subaru. 

Thank God for moms, right? Darla nods, beams with pride as she points at the new sandals she says her mother has just bought for her, the cutest sandals I think I’ve ever seen, the daintiest and prettiest feet strapped inside them, toenails painted the sweetest pink. She is going to make good choices, she says, and of course she is, I know she is, and I want this so much for her, I have to stand still for a while beside the glass doors, and oh how I hope, I hope, I hope, watching Darla take off into the sunshine and the warm spring air, as easily as a bird, freer right now than I have ever been.