We veer onto the highway and drive, the miles soaring past. When I see the sign for Somersville, I tell Finch it’s time for her to duck down into her hiding spot, which she does. We pull into the parking lot of Walmart, and I peer over into the back seat, checking to make sure she’s fully covered and inconspicuous. Tug at a corner where her shoe is sticking out.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” I tell her. “Stay right there and try not to move too much, all right? I won’t be long.”
“Okay,” she whispers, and the covers move a little.
I open the door and climb out.
“Finch?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I know. Love you, too.”
EIGHT
For a person who, for the better part of a decade, has not stepped foot inside any building other than a small cabin tucked in a hundred thousand acres of woods, Walmart is a startling and bewildering place. The lights, endless ranks of fluorescents, shine with devastating brightness. The rows and rows of gigantic televisions all blast the same scenes, in varying degrees of clarity, and with the slightest amount of difference in timing, so that if you stop and stare, one screen is maybe a millisecond behind the one next to it. Dizzying, baffling. Blue and yellow signs hang everywhere: LOW PRICES! HUGE SAVINGS ON ELECTRONICS! It doesn’t help that the holidays are right around the corner, so they’ve got Christmas trees and ornaments and plastic reindeer and a giant blow-up Santa Claus that bobbles back and forth. The sheer abundance of it all: so much, so much of everything. There is nothing muted about it, nothing held back.
The moment I step into the store, I feel a swell of panic coming, grasping at me like a drowning swimmer with a rescuer within reach. Which, you know what happens. The person pulls you under. Down, down, down. I blink, focus. No. Not today. Today there is a mission, a job that must be done, and at the heart of that job is Finch. Finch, who is waiting, tucked in a heap of blankets on the floor of the back seat. Finch, who is counting on me. I glance at my watch: a little past seven. I planned the trip so I’d be here early in the morning, before it gets busy, but not so early that they have a nighttime security guard on duty, wandering the store, hopped up on caffeine and bleary-eyed and bored.
I pull a cart from the rows at the front of the store, tug the list from my shirt pocket, and start walking toward a big blue sign that says PRODUCE. I gather my items from this section quickly, and I’m making good time and feeling better. But then things go south a bit.
How had I forgotten that the simple act of buying oatmeal is not so simple at all? There are whole grain oats, quick oats, steel cut oats, multigrain oats, and then there are multiple brands. Which one? And are they really different, or is this some scheme from the big companies to get people to buy more oatmeal? I try to picture the container, the tall cylinders that Jake always brought, try to recall the words on the side, but with six different options—six!—I can’t remember.
“Don’t usually do the grocery shopping, do you?”
I’m squatting, leaning over and squinting at the labels on the oatmeal, which happens to be on the bottom shelf of an aisle laden with maybe eight thousand boxes of cereal. I turn around, and towering above me is a middle-aged woman with a paunch and a blue cart crammed full of groceries. I look around, like maybe she is talking to someone else, or she’s on her phone or something.
She points to the oatmeal. “I saw you reading all the labels. My husband’s the same way. I ask him to pick up some yogurt, and without fail, he’ll call me and ask me which brand, which flavor.” She shakes her head. “We only ever buy the one kind. Dannon Light and Fit, vanilla. The same brand, the same flavor, every single time. It’s the only kind we ever have in the house. You’d think, after all these years, he’d at least recognize the container. Wouldn’t you?”
I can’t quite put a finger on whether I’m supposed to answer, but she stands there looking at me, like she’s waiting on a response. “I guess so, ma’am.” I turn back to the oatmeal, pick up one of the containers and act like I’m absorbed by the nutrition facts, hoping maybe she’ll take a hint.
No such luck.
“Yeah, that’s why I do the shopping. Me, I can sweep through here in thirty minutes, load up the cart with groceries for the whole week. Plus everything else. Toiletries, paper towels, napkins—I call those sundries.”
This is not the first time in my life such a thing has happened: a stranger, someone lonely hankering for a conversation, a whole world full of people that could fill such a need and who do they find? Me. I don’t know how or why, me being a “poor conversationalist”—at least that’s what the guidance counselor told me in the eleventh grade when I had the required appointment to figure out what my plans were after graduating. I had none, and told him that right off, and then when I didn’t have anything else to say, that’s when he said it. Cindy gave different words to it, and hers were nicer: “You’re a good listener” was how she put it.