Free Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski

rowhome where my mom grew up, just four from the end of the block. All the lights were out except for one: the kitchen. Somewhere in that house my mom’s father, Grandpop Ted, was probably enjoying his Saturday night, listening to polkas on the radio, drinking pull-top cans of Schaefer and burning through countless packs of Lucky Strikes. Grandpop Ted would die eighteen years later. Lung cancer.
    So was I standing here for a reason? Was I supposed to cross Bridge Street, knock on the door and ask him to kindly cut back on the smoking?
    After my dad was killed I spent a lot of nights in that house on Bridge Street, crashing on the green shag carpet in the living room. I’d listen to Grandpop Ted talk to Grandma Bea, both of them drinking and smoking, polkas on the radio in the background. They’d laugh. They’d fight. I’d curl up into a ball and cry a lot, but not so they could hear me.
    Maybe I should walk back to my own house and leave a note for my mom:
HI ANNE!
LISTEN, THE GUITAR-PLAYING DUDE WITH A PONYTAIL YOU JUST MARRIED? UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU LET HIM OUT OF THE HOUSE ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1980. TRUST ME ON THIS.
    SIGNED,
A FRIEND
     
    I drifted back into Frankford proper, which was littered with the landmarks of my childhood. Instead of a grungy Sav-N-Bag there was a clean, shiny Penn Fruit Supermarket, with new carts and freshly painted walls and rows of boxes and cans and fruit and meat and bread. Farther down on Frankford Avenue there was a poultry shop, where rotisserie chickens would spin in a case near the front window. It was night, so the birds were gone, but the rotisserie machine was still there, along with a sign advertising whole chickens, halves, legs, breasts, thighs. My stomach rumbled at the sight. There was a Kresge’s five-and-dime, with a luncheonette counter. There was a drugstore, not a chain, an honest-to-God neighborhood drugstore, also with a luncheonette counter. You could see it just beyond the front doors, even in the dark. There was a huge toy store named Snyder’s. There were record shops. Children’s clothing stores, where you could buy your kids their Easter outfits. There was a place to buy lingerie. There was a candy store. No cigarettes, no bread, no milk, no lottery tickets, no porn mags, no motor oil—just rows of Bit-o-Honeys and Swedish fish and sugared gum drops and Day-Glo jelly fruit slices and ovals of chocolate behind a vast glass counter. You could walk in with fifteen cents and walk out with a small white paper bag full of penny candy. Candy that actually cost a penny each.
    You trash a place in your mind for so long you forget that you used to actually love it.

     
    I could wander all night, but it wouldn’t change the truth. I was still a dead broke guy a few credits shy a college degree, living in a bad neighborhood without a job during the worst recession since the Great Depression. So what if I could pop pills and wake up in a different year? No one could see me. No one could talk to me. I didn’t matter to anyone now or in the present.
    There had to be something I could do with these pills. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out yet. Maybe my grandpop had it figured out.
    Then I remembered the boxes and crates.
     
     
    Back in the apartment I dove into the papers. What had I been thinking? He must have found a way to use the pills to his financial advantage. Clearly the man wasn’t rich, but he got by. He had to have been up to something in this apartment all this time. And the clues were probably in these boxes and crates.
    There were genealogy charts. Seemingly random newspaper clippings going back to the 1920s and running into the 1990s. Real estate listings. Birth notice pages. Medical reports. None of it organized. None of it made sense.
    What was he doing?
    For instance: one manila folder, marked “Crime Wave” in a shaky scrawl, was jammed with a series of clips from the local paper, the Frankford Gleaner. The articles