There was this kid. In the supermarket. I saw him walking through the store.

He was pushing a buggy. He was maybe 18 years old. He was skin and bones. And I mean skinny. He would have had to stand up five times just to make a shadow. Your standard issue, all-American kid.

His cart was brimming full. It’s not every day you see an 18-year-old doing that kind of intensive shopping.

We were in the canned seafood aisle. He was comparing cans of tuna. He asked me what the difference was between white albacore and chunk light.

“Everyone knows the difference,” I said confidently. I inspected the cans. Then, drawing on my training as an English major, I replied, “I have no idea.”

We got to talking.

His mother has been on chemo. Her breast cancer keeps coming back. She hasn’t been responding well to the radiation, either.

He had to drop out of college to help her. He wanted to major in English, which only shows you how confused this poor child is.

Caregiving became his life. At 18. He’s learned all the tricks. How to transfer a weak person from a wheelchair to a bed. How to feed someone. How to step into the shower with his mother, fully clothed, bear-hugging her, to bathe her.

“I even had to learn to help Mom use the bathroom,” he said.

Then his grandmother got ill. It was like a cruel joke from On High. So the boy took on caregiving duties for her, too. The elderly woman was hospitalized for pneumonia. It almost killed her. The boy stayed at her bedside. Day and night.

He bathed his grandmother, too.

So this year has been a tough one. He recently moved his mother and his grandmother both into the same rental house. A house he found online. Three bedrooms. Two baths. It was perfect.

His mother let the lease on her apartment lapse. His grandmother let the lease on her apartment go, too. He moved all the furniture. He transferred the utilities.

He’s been caring for two women who are both, he says, on the mend. And the new living situation has been a learning experience for Junior.

I asked him what the main lesson he’s learned since moving two grown women into the same house together.

“Girls don’t get along,” he said.

We talked for a little longer. We found our way up to the checkout lane together. He scanned his items, and it was then that I could see the bags beneath his eyes. The emptiness in his eyes.

“Yeah, I’m tired,” he admitted. “But not in my soul. My soul feels good. I know I’m doing the same thing they’d do for me.

“And one day, they’re both going to be in perfect health again, and we’ll all be so happy, and we’re all gonna look back at this and laugh at these hard times.”

When the cashier finished ringing up his groceries, the cashier informed the boy that a stranger had footed the bill. She wouldn’t say who did it.

But I wish like hell it would have been me.