Everyone knows that the cardinal rule of grocery shopping is to get in the shortest checkout line. It is absolutely crucial to follow this rule when you’re grocery shopping with your baby, because babies have a tendency to be angelic throughout entire the entire shopping trip, then come unglued the second you get to the checkout and can’t hold them because you’ve got to unload your buggy, fish your wallet out of your purse, pay, and be otherwise incapacitated.

Unless, of course, a Walmart cashier claims your baby as her baby.Which is what happened to me–inevitably, I suppose given my relationship with Walmart.

Two weeks ago I was speeding toward the checkout lanes, eyes scanning each conveyor belt for the one with the fewest groceries. The shortest lanes–indeed, open and completely empty, as it was bright and early Monday  morning–were the 20 Items or Fewer registers (Yes–the signs actually say “20 Items or Less,” but that’s grammatically incorrect so I refuse to write it), but as I was doing a week’s worth of shopping, I passed them by without so much as a glance.

Until one of the express cashiers called out, “Hey, baby!” which stopped me in my tracks. Not because I thought I was getting hit on, but because the cashier, a middle-aged woman, was speaking literally– I’ve been stopped enough while grocery shopping to know when someone is talking to the Burt Squirt.

I paused in my pursuit of the shortest checkout line to indulge the friendly (and no doubt bored) cashier, pleased to see that I recognized her. Once upon a time, she told me the Burt Squirt was juicy. She’d checked me out lots of times since then–not surprising, since I do my grocery shopping every Monday around the same time, though she wasn’t normally in the express lanes, for which, as I mentioned, I had too many groceries. So, after we exchanged pleasantries (or rather, she flirted with the Burt Squirt: “Your mama didn’t see me, but you saw me, and you grinned, didn’t you, baby! Yes, you know me, big boy!”), I started to wheel my cart around in search of another register.

“Y’all come over here to me!” she said, and wouldn’t hear my protests about having a good deal more than twenty items. “I gotta talk to my baby, see what new with him!”

It was at this point that I realized, to my chagrin, that I’d never bothered to find out her name, even though it had been right there pinned to her blue polo shirt for me to read every time she’d rung up my groceries. Tempie–I could remember that, since the Dallas Classical radio station’s daytime announcer is named Tempie.

As Walmart Tempie rang us up, she kept up a running conversation with Liam, as well as with the customer behind me in line: “This my Monday baby! Look how he smile at me! Oh, he waving now–he know it time to go, mmm-hmm, he know it!”

Last Monday Tempie wasn’t working the self-checkouts, but was back at her usual lane–which happened to be the shortest, so I got in it. Before she’d even finished scanning all her current customer’s groceries, she’d spotted us farther back in line and was saying, “There’s my Monday baby! He smiling at me–he know his friend!”

His friend.

She wasn’t his cashier.

He wasn’t her customer.

Friends.

For the first time since I began making dreaded weekly grocery shopping trips, it occurred to me that more goes on in Walmart than just hurrying in, checking off all the items on my list, and hurrying back out again. (More, even, than having another funny encounter to add to my collection of vaguely amusing anecdotes.)

Today I broke the cardinal rule of grocery shopping. I didn’t get in the shortest checkout line. I looked for Tempie, and I got in her line, which was, in fact, the longest. But the smile that lit up her tired face when she saw the Burt Squirt was worth the wait–if, indeed, we did wait any extra time; I thought the rhythmic beep beep of the bar code scanner accelerated, as if Tempie was in a hurry to finish up with her other customer so she could talk to the Burt Squirt properly.

Or maybe she didn’t work any faster. Maybe I just realized there was no need to rush, that there are more unpleasant things I could have been doing this morning than listening to a grocery store cashier tell a total stranger how nice my–her–baby is who comes to see her every Monday.

Even if–especially if–it’s at Walmart.