was a green spot of mold on the last slices of bread in the Wonderbread bag.
Outside, Bobby and Paul were hauling bricks, placing them in careful rows beside one another, while Sam ran back and forth from the deck to the edge of the ravine, occasionally flapping his arms. Jiselle called to Sara and Camilla, “Anyone want to go to the store?”
They both did. It had already become a rare treat to go into St. Sophia. Gas was eleven dollars a gallon, and they were trying to conserve what was in the car for emergencies.
They drove in Mark’s Mazda—Camilla beside Jiselle, Sara in the backseat. Jiselle put the top down, for the hard breeze of it, and turned the radio on to the oldies station—happy, stupid songs about being a teenager in a perfect world. Even the car crashes in that world seemed safe, predictable. There were never any special announcements on the oldies station. The only chatter was about a contest in which the naming of a songwriter could win you a thousand dollars. Sara and Camilla nodded along to the songs, seeming content enough. “Take a Letter, Maria.” “Hey There, Lonely Girl.”
Although it had been dry, the rains had been relentless the month before, so the flowers were as vivid as Jiselle ever remembered them. Along the side of the road the wildflowers waved their caution-yellow faces at the sun. Red-winged blackbirds darted among the blooms and grasses, landing on long blades, not even bending them, appearing to be weightless. Butterflies and moths swarmed around the purple-blue of cornflowers. The Queen Anne’s lace made a webby froth in the ditches.
Sara let her elbow rest on the car door and opened and closed her fingers in the wind as the car flew through it, as if she were trying to hang on to the air. Camilla leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, her face lit up by the sun. Jiselle watched the road in front of her spinning out like a black ribbon. There were almost no other cars on the road.
“If you don’t want to hear the bad news out there, folks, you’ve finally found the right station!” a man with a deep voice, which managed to sound girlish in its excitement, shouted over the radio. “We’re just playing music and telling really stupid jokes!”
When Jiselle finally reached the edge of St. Sophia and pulled up to the Safeco, the parking lot was nearly empty. There were just a few small cars parked at the edges—employees’ cars? A couple of motorbikes were on the sidewalk outside the store, and an empty wheelchair, looking abandoned, sat by itself next to the Dumpster. There was one truck parked out front, and a man in a blue shirt was tossing crates out of the back of it onto the pavement. He didn’t look at Jiselle and the girls when they passed by, but after they’d already started to pass through the automatic doors, Jiselle heard him mutter, “Hot babes,” as if it were an accusation. When they were on the other side of the doors, which had closed, Jiselle looked back.
The man had a wild black beard and bright blue eyes. He was staring at her with his chin lifted. She turned away again fast.
Inside the supermarket, Sara and Camilla parted, heading down different aisles, pushing their separate carts. Jiselle took a red plastic basket and said, “Let’s not forget to get Saltines and 7-Up for the Schmidts.”
Saltines and 7-Up seemed to be all Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt ate. It was the only item from the store they ever requested when Jiselle offered to pick something up for them.
What were they living on otherwise?
They never took their car out of the garage anymore, but they looked healthy enough. Like the water Mr. Schmidt said he had, did he also have a stockpile of food? Was he setting traps—eating possum, squirrel? There were apple trees in his backyard, but they had only just begun to grow small, hard fruit. Even if he’d managed somehow to plant a vast vegetable garden, not much could have come up there yet either.
Jiselle would buy them, she decided, some cans of tuna and sardines, if there were any, but she went to the cracker aisle first to get the Saltines, which were plentiful and light to carry in her basket. She took two boxes and moved on.
Freshly mopped, the floors of the grocery store were wet and streaked, but there seemed to be no one working there except for one girl behind one cash register. Many of the things Jiselle wanted—eggs, fresh vegetables, and fruit—lay behind the glass doors of the padlocked freezers or under the heavy yellow contamination cloths. Still, there seemed to be more things on the shelves that afternoon than there had been the week before, when they were still cordoning off the bakery aisle. Now, some of the bread was moldy, but Jiselle found the best loaf she could and put it in her basket. And she was glad to see that there was milk. Many gallons of it. And cheese. And even yogurt, which she’d been learning to live without but still loved. She was happy, passing the displays of canned soup and stuffing mix, to see the plenty. There was still more than enough in the grocery store to feed them for months—
She tracked down peanut butter for Sam, Frosted Flakes. She shook the box just to hear the flakes inside. Sam would be so happy about the Frosted Flakes. She took the last box of Raisin Bran off the shelf, too, but put it back when she saw that the bottom had been ripped and the waxy pouch inside was open. She picked up a box of Pop-Tarts instead.
At the checkout line, they stood and waited for the girl behind the cash register to finish a phone conversation before scanning their purchases.
“That’s none of her business,” the cashier hissed and whispered. “She can
She had her back turned to them, as if they would not be able to hear her words if they couldn’t see her mouth, so they waited in the lane, surrounded by the usual magazines and tabloids, which were covered with the usual headlines:
Every one of those magazines was at least two months old. Sara picked up a
Finally, the girl behind the cash register got off the phone and rang up their purchases wearily. Each time she scanned an item she seemed to also glance at her watch. She looked pregnant and was wearing a green apron over her protruding stomach and, under the apron, a dress with yellow tulips on it.
Was it possible that she smelled a bit like whiskey? Could that sweet, hot scent be her perfume, or did the smell drift over only when the girl opened her small, glossy red mouth?
When she’d finally scanned the last item, the cashier looked at her watch for several seconds, as if timing something internal before she looked up, sighing, and asked, “That it?”
“Yes,” Jiselle said, and paid in cash.
The man who had been unloading boxes from the semi was sitting now, unmoving, behind the wheel of his truck in the parking lot. He blared his horn when they passed in front of him, and it felt physical, that noise—Jiselle and the girls stumbled a bit, their cart veering slightly out of control. Sara was pushing, Camilla was walking beside her, and Jiselle quickly stepped between the two of them, linking their arms through hers, hurrying to the Mazda. “Fucking asshole,” she said, and she saw the girls exchange amused looks. It crossed Jiselle’s mind to say something to them then—about men, about being careful, now that they were a house without a man in it, but when she began to form the first part of the first sentence, she could not find the words. Instead, she kept their arms hooked around hers.
Jiselle turned the radio back on to the oldies station. She was about to turn right into the road when she realized that the long stream of vehicles passing the Safeco exit was a funeral procession. “Shit,” she said before she could keep herself from saying it. The procession was, of course, going in her direction. Who knew how long they’d have to wait? Sara took a fingernail file out of her purse and began to file her nails. Camilla opened a months-old
