There’s a certain luxury being a stranger.

No need to get close, no yearning to get to know more about someone than the minimum.

The man behind the counter, the woman at the bank, the teenager bagging groceries, the waitress serving food.

Faces in the crowd. No eye contact, no matter. There’s no need to build a close personal relationship with the owner of the letters on a name tag.

Then along comes someone who complicates things. Someone who arouses curiosity. Someone who can’t be easily forgotten.

Someone who when they’re gone creates a void that makes one wish they had only learned a name.

Someone like Jacqueline Alma Bouie-Green.

Better known to many as “Kmart Jackie” — the woman behind the checkout counter at Austin’s Big Kmart Store.

“I knew Jackie,” Myrna Kruckeberg said. “I always said ‘hi’ to her every time I saw her.”

“She was just sort of quiet,” the neighbor said.

Kruckeberg lives at the Twin Towers, where “Kmart Jackie” lived until her death March 10.

Everett Hackensmith, the store manager last December 2008, when Bouie-Green was the recipient of a kidney transplant, said of her, “People don’t wear labels or name-tags saying they’re disabled and can’t stand up and do everything other people can, so nobody knew what she was going through.”

She was, of course, going through a lot. All her life, in fact.

Her sister, Trudy Allen-Barren, said her sister suffered diabetes, congestive heart failure, a stroke and breast cancer before needing the kidney transplant in December 2008.

Dealing with adversity was a lifestyle for the woman.

“She was born premature and weighed only 3 pounds at birth,” Allen-Barren said.

The family originated in Philadelphia, where Bouie-Green went to Catholic elementary schools and graduated from Mercy Vocational High School.

A gifted singer, she also coached basketball.

The single mother sought a better life than urban Philadelphia could offer and moved with her son, Braheim, and daughter, Catherine, to Austin in 1996.

According to the sister, Bouie-Green “loved to work.” Last summer her health started deteriorating again. When her kidneys started to fail, she would often be hospitalized weekends only to recover enough to go to work at her favorite job: clerking at the Kmart store.

“She loved that place and her job. The people were so kind to her,” Allen-Barren said.

Despite health problems, Bouie-Green made work a priority and she appreciated her job.

“Kmart has been all I had,” she said last fall while waiting for a kidney. “My job was the most important thing to me.”

The waiting was unbearable, but, of course, necessary as it is for all those in need of transplants.

“All I could do was wait and hope, have patience and pray,” she said last year.

When the kidney transplant was made in late-December 2008, she said, “It was a miracle.”

After a lengthy hospital stay, she returned to her apartment at the Twin Towers to recover.

“She always said she wanted to go back to work as soon as she could,” the sister recalled.

More complications developed and Allen-Barren said, “The end came quickly.”

“Kmart Jackie” died never knowing who donated the life-saving — temporarily — kidney she needed.

Since her death, more people are talking about “Kmart Jackie.”

They remember the woman sitting on a chair behind the counter, always smiling, always polite, always professional.

That she is no longer here seems to generate surprise as well as recognition, albeit superfluous, of the woman sitting on a chair behind the counter at a discount store.

So much so that it seems inadequate.

“She was that kind of a person,” her sister said. “We all loved her, of course, and we saw in the family how she dealt with so much pain and adversity for so long.”

“I think she would like to be remembered as a person who loved life and her job and did the best she could under the circumstances,” the sister said.

Funeral services were held March 16.

The 56-year-old woman’s body was cremated. Plans call for her ashes to be returned to Philadelphia, where she was born.

The woman died poor, and there are funeral expenses to be paid.

For more information about helping defray those expenses, call Trudy Allen-Barren at (507) 319-7591.