THE PERSON AT THE COUNTER
ALM No.93, September 2026
ESSAYS
It was a hot July noon in California’s Central Valley when I went to pick up five-year-old Fernando at his kindergarten. He was somewhere in the beehive of a multi-tiered conference center repurposed as a summer camp. To find him, I had to get directions from a woman in a blue smock at a gate.
A young assistant in a classroom of humid air and blinds drawn against the sun met me with silence and a closed look. She handed over sheets of crayoned-in figures, saying something I did not hear over the din of tiny kids in a giant building. She pointed to a sign-out folder on a table blocking the door.
Fernando marched out, sea eyes solemn, neither unhappy nor happy, with little to say about his day of new teachers, new kids, new everything.
He pulled his hand away from mine. I smoothed his fair hair.
Would he be OK?
On the way home, we stopped to eat at a place not famous for its whole foods, a place Fernando loves, a place with golden arches once upon a time.
We went to McDonald's.
At a towering kiosk near the abandoned counter, it took some time to tap out Fernando’s order full of deletions and revisions. An eternity later, we had our food—no onion, no pickle, no mustard, no ketchup, no cheese.
As soon as we were seated across from one another, unpacking our Happy Meals in their vivid cartoon boxes, a fuzzy voice sounded on the public address system: “Will the person at the counter please leave or we will call the police.”
Nobody at the other Formica tables seemed to be moved by the word “police.” No one was looking up from their paper-lined trays.
The warning repeated.
I rose to investigate—just as the message over the loudspeaker changed its tense. “We have called the police.”
Fernando and I packed up our apple slices in plastic and our fries. With everyone else, we filed out the double doors to avoid whatever was about to happen.
After I had buckled Fernando into his car seat and gotten behind the wheel of my Honda, we saw a solitary, unkempt woman outside the glass doors, on the margins of the commotion of her presence. She stood pacific, pale hair, in a colorless dress, asserting a realm of her own.
I decided I needed to fix the silence. I decided I needed to say something about our world to a five-year-old. “You know, Fernando, it’s possible the person at the counter was just hungry. I don’t know why they called the police.”
“Maybe she had a weapon.” Fernando’s brow was furrowed.
I shook my head. I couldn’t know for sure that the person at the counter didn’t have a weapon, though I was reasonably certain she did not—if just from my long time on Earth.
Fernando was silent, thinking.
“I can see if she needs something because I’m a grown-up.”
I have been as guilty as anyone of erring on the side of protection over generosity. With a child along, I was trying to do both.
“But, Fernando, you never offer help by yourself to grown-ups we don’t know because you're a kid.”
Fernando sat quietly in his car seat, earnest eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. He put one hand to his chest and said, "You're a kid in your heart.”
Fernando had difficulty with his “r’s” and said “hot” for heart.
I took his “you” to be generic, not a compliment, but a reminder.
I should add here that Fernando is not my son. He is my grandson. And many months before our trip to McDonald’s, life’s storms and stress led up to an argument that strained family connections.
“It’s like a car accident,” a trusted priest said gently as I asked for counsel. “No one’s fault. It will take time to heal.”
It would take more than time.
The question I asked myself about Fernando that day I picked him up at his summer program—would he be OK?—was more about me.
Our families have since reconciled and my heart is doing its best to return to its native state, the state a woman turned away at a counter and a five-year-old reminded me to restore.
—Fernando’s name is changed for privacy.
Carol Zapata-Whelan has a PhD in Comparative Literature (UCLA) and teaches Spanish/Hispanic literature at California State University, Fresno. Her work to raise disability awareness has appeared in Newsweek, The Brown Journal of Medical Humanities, LA Times News Syndicate, as well as in Agora at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and H.E.A.L at the University of Florida College of Medicine. She has contributed fiction to literary anthologies Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (Santa Clara University Press), Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon), Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Experience of Disability through Literature and the Fine Arts, and other collections. Her memoir, Finding Magic Mountain: Life with Five Glorious Kids and a Rogue Gene Called FOP (Hachette), is also in Mandarin and Korean. Her first children's picture book is The Wish Sisters (Lighthouse). She is currently contributing to a colleague’s children’s series for peace, Pláticas de Paz, and her forthcoming YA historical novel is Sol & Serafina & the A.I.R. She lives in California with her husband and son, world’s first MD with the rare musculoskeletal disorder Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP): ifopa.org.
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