Forgetful Mother

This happened several years ago, when I was a senior in high school. As a teenager living in a small town, there wasn’t anywhere open at 2 in the morning besides Wal Mart. Well me and my friend walked over to pick up some snacks after a party. When we were walking through the parking lot, a crappy old beater car pulls up in the handicap spot a few spots down. This lady gets out, the car still running, goes around to the passenger side door, opens it up and gets out her baby (no car seat!), and proceeds inside (car still running). This child could not have possibly been older than 18months. We just made some joke about her being a tweeker and went on in since it was pretty cold out. We picked up some food, and were heading for the checkout. That’s when we saw tweeker lady again, shopping for clothes (at 2a.m.) repeatedly telling her crying child to “shut up”. Well we had nothing better to do, so we decided to browse around the magazines to spy on her and see what other crazy things this lady would be doing. She looked at clothes with a crying baby for another 30 minutes, before suddenly hurrying up to the register and only buying a pack of cigarettes. We hurried up and paid for our food and saw she had parked the cart with her baby right outside the door as she smoked a cigarette. We sat on a curb in the parking lot and ate a candy bar, and watched for a minute as she smoked 2 cigarettes, then walked over to her still running car and drove off, no baby. She had left her poor child in the cart outside in the cold. We ran in, told an employee a lady had left her baby in the cart outside, and got the hell out of there (we weren’t about to leave that baby in the cold, but we also didn’t want a minor consumption or curfew violation either). Just as we got to the stoplight to cross the street, the cops roll up, and right after the cops, returns the tweeker. We didn’t stay to watch for fear of getting in trouble, we just hoped the mom would be put in jail, and the baby would be put in a loving home.