“Why do people do this?” she asks no one in particular, waving her hand at the carts. “It’s so inconsiderate.” We’ve been back in New York for a few hours and already the luxurious spaciousness of Texas is a distant memory. The store is a pit. The kind that requires four flag bearers to negotiate the enormous winding serpent of impatient New Yorkers from devolving into melees over riced cauliflower and smoked trout. Normally I’d rather spend the day at the literal post office than shop at any Trader Joe’s, but I need my provisions. My prewashed salads, my zucchini noodles, my tamari rice cakes.
June disappears and reemerges with a paper shot glass of sample coffee. I drink it. I’m touched that she added almond milk. I toss the paper cup into the wooden barrel and miss. I furtively look around when I pick it up. I grab a carton of egg whites, salsa, beef jerky, and a sleeve of tricolor bell peppers. I swap the salsa out for hot sauce. The jar’s too heavy.
June throws a stack of frozen meals into our cart. “This is garbage,” I remark, picking up the frosty tray of enchiladas.
“It’s not garbage; it’s vegan,” she says, adding one more plastic-enrobed brick while holding my gaze. “I make it when I’m tired.”
I grab four more sheepishly and add them to the cart. I feel guilty all the time when I forget she’s sick. As if the cancer will discover my negligence and multiply faster out of pique.
June disappears down the bread aisle, so I eye-fuck a pouch of salt-and-pepper pistachios, wondering how many servings it would be if I inhaled the whole thing. That’s when I hear my sister yelling for me, Jayne and then Ji-young. Mom used to do this, scream our Korean names in public. I’m mortified. I text her back. JFC what? But she doesn’t answer. I wind the cart to the next aisle, and there she is, smiling and waving me over. Talking to someone.
Patrick.
I rear back so violently that I crash into a woman behind me, who exclaims, “Ow-wah,” as if it’s a two-syllable word. I flip around and apologize, lurching forward. As I do, I buck the cart into a South Asian girl in white leggings standing with Patrick. “Ow-wah,” she exclaims, rubbing her ankle. Her perfect sable eyebrows are in a full-tilt snit.
He’s wearing a beanie and a thick, plaid work shirt. He looks sensational.
I, on the other hand, am wearing his sweats.
I grin, chastened, but something in the way his companion turns to him, indicating her injury, looking up with childlike concern, makes the smile die on my lips.
“Sorry,” I mumble uncertainly at her.
Patrick’s eyes yield nothing. As cold and resolute as a slammed door.
“Look who it is!” June’s double-fisting paper cups of samples but still managing to make game-show hands.
I lose the staring match and blink down at his cart.
“Hey,” I relent.
I must have overshot my casual tone because uncertainty flickers across June’s face. “You know who this is, right?”
I nod and force myself to smile. “Sure. Hey, Patrick.” My tone is pointedly treacly, nearing hostility.
“Yeah, hey. Jayne.” Patrick waves a little.
I try to read his tone from the way he says my name. I decide that he seems annoyed.
“Holy shit,” says June, turning to Patrick but not before shooting me a look. “I must have conjured you.” She elbows him sportingly on his arm. “We were just in Texas and we went to church and I totally said to myself, I wonder what Patrick’s up to, and now here you are. Fuck.”
She looks at me again, like, Can you believe this?
“I’m June,” says my sister to the girl beside him.
It unfolds in slow motion. Patrick’s palm lifts off the red cart handle, ascends, and then lands on the girl’s shoulder. Her glossy tresses shimmer from the contact. I’m clutching the pistachios so hard, my hand cramps.
“This is…，” begins Patrick falteringly, staring right at me. His eyebrows frown.
“Aliyah,” says his beautiful friend as she touches her heart meaningfully.
“Sorry, Aliyah, I’m the worst, but I have to…” June pulls out her phone and throws it in selfie mode. “I have to send this to my mom. She’ll flip. Patrick, we literally just got back today. Jayne, get closer.”
My heart lurches nauseatingly in my chest. I back into them with my hair dusty from dry shampoo, smelling of airplane exhaust.
When my sister goes from portrait to landscape so she can fully include Aliyah, I almost ram our cart into her. “June,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Thanks,” June mumbles, scrolling through the photos. I make a desperate effort to catch Patrick’s eyes, but he’s transfixed by the pounds and pounds of trail mix, snack bags of nuts, dried fruit, candy, and boxes of granola bars in his cart.
“Camping?” I smile weakly. I’m desperate to pull out my phone, to check if he read my last text.
“In a sense,” says Patrick.
Aliyah smiles up at him, the adoration apparent. “Not exactly,” she says, in what I can hear now is a British accent. Fun. I brace myself for when she tells me she went to Oxford, too. Like every other scarily gorgeous woman in New York. “It’s a little more mission-based. I’m in the Peace Corps, so I’m stocking up before I head back.”
Cool. A genius humanitarian. Even still, the mention of the Peace Corps dislodges something in my memory. “Your sister’s in the Peace Corps too, right?”
“Oh, you know Kiki?” Aliyah brightens with the intensity of several poreless suns. “That’s how we met,” says Aliyah. “Kirsten and I have been friends for a dog’s age.”
“Oh my God, your accent is delightful,” says June, who never says things like “delightful.”
A kind of snort-laugh escapes my throat. “Oh, totally,” I enthuse. “Delightful.” I want to throw a slab of mission figs directly into Patrick’s face.
“Anyway, we should…” Aliyah nods toward the massive lines.
“Yeah,” Patrick and I say in unison.
“What’s your number?” asks June, already tapping his name into her phone. “I’ll message you these.” He leans in close to my sister and carefully recites it. His eyes flicker up to mine so quickly I may have imagined it.
“Good to see y’all,” he says, smiling benignly and turning around. Aliyah waves.
“That was nice,” says June, handing me a cup of something gray and wet. “It’s pulled pork; it’s pretty good.” She crushes the pork mash into her mouth without a fork as if it’s a Push Pop. I shake my head. She eats the other one.
“You know it wouldn’t kill you just to eat it,” she says. “It’s literally a speck of food.”
I push the cart down the aisle realizing with disorienting numbness that I’m devastated. I feel ridiculous.
“I’ve always liked Patrick,” says June, oblivious. “But she seems like a nightmare. Like, who owns white leggings? That’s like people who own white couches. Does she dress like that in the Peace Corps? How is she doing her laundry?”
I toss macadamia nuts and chocolate-covered almonds into the cart. And mini peanut butter cups.