Role Playing
Cathy Yardley
CHAPTER 1
OBVIOUSLY NOT FINE
Stay calm. It’ll all be fine.
If there was one place Maggie Le did not want to be, it was pushing a wobbly shopping cart through the narrow aisles of Tasty Great, the primary supermarket in the town of Fool’s Falls, eastern Washington State, population five thousand. Unfortunately, it was the only place to get food, and after eating tuna straight out of the can with a few farting squirts of mustard from a bottle that was more air than condiment, she had finally conceded that her cupboards were truly bare.
Still, it was fine. She’d get in, stock up, and get out with a minimum of interaction. Some pleasantries to the checkout lady. Comments on the weather.
She could do this. Or, more to the point, her best friend, Rosita, had told her she had to do this when she’d left her a voice mail asking if flour had an expiration date.
She dragged her feet, frowning at the articles on various shelves. She would admit to feeling a little off the past few weeks. She wanted to blame it on being busy. She’d just finished edits on a nonfiction book for a business publisher that was a regular client, then done some sample edits for possible future jobs. She’d done some administrative stuff—spreadsheets and money tracking—then lined up a few more projects, including editing a horror novel at the end of the month. For a freelancer, busy meant money, and that was always good, even if it meant she overbooked occasionally.
Because she worked from home, she was used to setting her own schedule. In the past few weeks she’d started to abandon her circadian rhythms. She found herself working whenever she felt like it, getting up when she felt like it, sleeping when she had to. Which meant, for the past week, she had found herself asleep in the recliner more than once, sending a response email at three in the morning （her client later replied, “Why were you up at three a.m.?” which, okay, rude）， and eating what was left in the house when she felt like it.
Some people might think this erratic, possibly a cause for concern. She preferred to think of it as not giving a single, solitary fuck.
Which, she supposed, might also be considered just the teeniest bit aggressive.
To frame it more positively, she saw it as freeing. That was the whole point of working from home and living alone. She could dance buck naked in her living room at four in the morning if she wanted to, music blaring. She could sleep twenty hours on her kitchen floor. Granted, her forty-eight-year-old body would probably make its displeasure known if she did either, but the point was, she could. She had absolute autonomy, no one to witness, no one else’s opinion weighing in. As long as she was finishing milestones on time and meeting deadlines, and most importantly paying her bills, she was as free as the proverbial bird.
But she did need to eat. She was down to expired cans of light fruit cocktail, a tin of Spam, and condiments. Hence, going to town.
She navigated her way through the store, feeling a little disoriented. She hadn’t bought groceries for one person in decades, she realized. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted, as opposed to what her son would eat and what she could easily cook in large quantities. She just knew that she wanted this whole thing over with.
If I load up, she reasoned, that will pare down the number of times I have to go to town. She had an outdoor freezer as well as her refrigerator, and she was used to stocking up her pantry.
Her friend Mac would say that she’d graduated from introvert to hair-shirt-wearing hermit. Then again, Mac lived way out in Toronto. And she’d never actually met Mac in real life, although they’d been Twitter besties for the better part of fifteen years. They’d connected over a shared love of Robotech, both revealing that they’d written fanfic for the animated show years before the proliferation of fan fiction sites.
For all she knew, Mac actually lived in a cave with good Wi-Fi, so maybe Mac wouldn’t judge.
After several agonizing minutes, she got an industrial-size box of chicken-flavored ramen, a big jug of soy sauce, and a bottle of fish sauce that ought to last her for a few months at least. Since she was in the store’s “ethnic” section （such as it was）， she tossed in cans of refried beans and salsa after it. Then she maneuvered to the pasta aisle and loaded up on pasta, tomato sauce, and parmesan in the plastic jars.
“Maggie? Is that you?”
She stiffened.
Oh, God, no.
She turned to find a woman with stick-straight toffee-brown hair and big hazel eyes smiling at her. Her face was a wide oval, wearing a casual amount of makeup, with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and her lips. She wore a pair of jeans and an aqua sweater with a camouflage-pattern hunter’s jacket over it, a nod to the cooler October weather.
“How are you?” the woman said, and to Maggie’s horror, she looked like she was going in for a hug. “I’ve been worried about you!”
Maggie made a little “eep” noise and instinctively took a step back.
God damn it! She’d deliberately rushed so she didn’t shop on the weekend, a time when she’d be more likely to run into one of the few people she knew, even after living ten years in this town. So of course, today would be the one day she ran into . . .
“Hi, Deb,” Maggie said, her voice sounding rusty to her own ears. It occurred to her that she didn’t talk to clients often . . . her communication was purely online. She also tended to text if not messaging or emailing. She might not have spoken to anyone this week.
Okay. Maybe longer.
Deb looked amused. “How’re you holding up?” she asked. “It must be so strange, Kit moving away so far. Of course, we always knew he’d be going off to college, but Seattle’s so far away!”
Maggie felt like her chest was caving in on itself. She nodded curtly.
Deb either didn’t notice, or did a good job pretending. “Harrison misses him something fierce,” she continued, referring to her own son, “but at least they can still text and play video games online or whatever. When did you drop him off at U Dub?”
“Two weeks ago,” Maggie croaked, then cleared her throat. “I drove him over, got him settled in the dorms.”
Deb tutted. “Empty nest. And you’re all alone on that big property! Not even a dog!”
Shut up shut up shut up.
“I’m fine,” Maggie said instead.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Deb instantly crooned. “You must be lonely. I know I would be if Harrison left town! Especially since the divorce . . .”
“I’ve been divorced for five years,” Maggie snapped before she could stop herself.
Deb pulled away for a second, her expression sad. “My divorce,” she clarified.
Oh, shit. Right.
Maggie vaguely remembered that Deb had gotten divorced, what, a year ago? Guilt pummeled her. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“That’s fine,” Deb responded, with a cheery smile. Deb was nothing if not cheery, Maggie remembered. Kit and Harrison had been best friends from grade school on, and while Maggie was hardly what anyone would call social, she’d still interacted with Deb—waving hi when one or the other dropped their kid at the respective best friend’s house, talking to her while volunteering for whatever school functions Maggie couldn’t weasel out of. “My point was, even though Harrison moved out after graduation, he’s constantly over, raiding the fridge. Doing his laundry.” She laughed. “It’s like he still lives there!”