Four
Since she had to stop at the grocery store on the way to work, she was going to have to drive. Not that she was going to buy too many things to carry, but there wasn't a real grocery store anywhere within walking distance. There was the little deli next door, but they only carried a few grocery items, and no cat food, or Jason would have just walked over and gotten it. They had bagels and teabags, of course, but she might as well get it all at one place.
She plucked a flower as she walked down the sidewalk toward the street, and put it in the little vase that came standard with the Volkswagen. She'd had to remember to fill the vase with water when she got to the office. The vase was silly, but she liked it. All cars should come with flower vases, she thought. I bet there would be fewer traffic jams.
She wandered around the grocery store, swinging her little red hand cart and filling it up with a half dozen bagels, tea bags, cream cheese, four apples, a Hershey bar, and a handful of postcards that caught her fancy as she stood in line waiting to pay. They were four for a dollar, and they were lovely. She spun the circular wire rack and chose four--soft-focus, hand-colored photographs showing local beach scenes: an Adirondack chair sitting on the sand looking out over the ocean, with a Christmas wreath slung over the chair back, a pelican sitting on the roof of the Anna Maria Island pier next to a tattered American flag, a falling-down shack near the beach, made beautiful by the artist's treatment, and an inflatable Santa on top of one of the Holmes Beach sourvenir/t-shirt shops, rendered surreal by the soft wash of pinks and blues.
Even though she had lived here for a couple of years, and tried to act like (and mostly felt like) a native, she still liked a lot of the touristy stuff, and the uniquely Floridian kitsch tickled her. She especially loved Christmas in Florida, with the tacky Christmas-lights-on-palm trees decorations. There was just something about the juxtaposition that amused her, the completely ridiculous idea of Santa Claus in his red and white suit, stockings hung on fake fireplaces, and Christmas trees and plastic snowmen, and snowman sculptures made of sand. They made her laugh, and these days, anything that made her laugh was worth cultivating.
She walked out of the store into the sunshine, and stopped on the sidewalk for a moment to reseat the bag of groceries more firmly in the crook of her arm. The air was fragrant with the scent of flowers and the ever-present salty small of the ocean. She never got tired of it. Chicago seemed very far away on mornings like this.
* * *
She was dreamily arranging the postcards on the corkboard in her office when Jason, rummaging through the bag of groceries, called out, "Um, Sarah?"
"Uh huh?" she answered, absently.
"Cat food?"
"What?"
"Did you forget the cat food?"
"Aw, damn!"
When she looked up, both Jason and Sophie stood in the doorway, Jason with a bemused expression on his face and Sophie with an annoyed one on hers. "I'm sorry," she said to both of them, and stood up, digging her wallet out of her bag and stuffing it in her pocket. "I'll go back."
"I can go," Jason said, taking a noisy bite out of one of the apples. "But I'd have to borrow your car, since the deli doesn't carry cat foot . . ."
"No, that's okay. I'll go. Did I forget anything else?"
"Not as far as I can tell. I think you got everything else. The cat food was the most important thing, though," he said, with a nod toward Sophie sitting grumpily in the doorway next to him.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said, waving her hand at him, and went back out into the sunlight, bending down to run her hand along the cat's back as she passed. "Sorry, baby. Get Jason to give you another bagel." And I got such a good parking space, too, she muttered to herself as she walked out the door.
* * *
While she was standing in the grocery line for the second time, admiring the rest of the postcard collection and idly wondering if she should buy four more, someone walked up behind her in the line. She turned slightly to look behind her and see if it was someone she knew, and it was the guy from the bookstore last night, the guy dressed all in black, who was still dressed all in black, black from head to toe, including the same heavy black topcoat he had been wearing the night before.
He smiled, and he at least had the grace to look embarrassed. "Hi," he said, holding out a plastic bottle of orange juice in apparent explanation of his presence in the grocery store. He had obviously just grabbed it from the cooler in front of the checkout stand. She narrowed her eyes at him. "Hello," she murmured, and turned around. Then turned to him again.
"Are you following me?"
"No! Not at all. I just needed . . . um," looking down at the bottle in his hand.
"Orange juice," she prompted.
"Orange juice. Right. Pure coincidence. Really."
Uh huh. He certainly was good-looking, in a high-strung sort of way, but she wasn't interested in a relationship with anyone at the moment, especially someone who acted as oddly as this guy did. If he was following her around thinking to ask her out, she was going to have to set him straight sooner or later. He didn't scare her, especially, but she certainly couldn't have some lovesick man camping out on her doorstep.
Still, he really was good-looking . . .
She reached the front of the line and paid for the cat food. She didn't have enough cash and had to dig her folded-up emergency check out of the back pocket of her wallet, and ask the clerk (one of Jason's friends from school who often came into the bookstore after her shift was over) for a pen, and by the time she had written the check and was handed the cat food in a plastic carrier bag, and turned around to say good-bye to the Man in Black, as she had come to think of him, he was gone.
Surprised, she looked around, thinking maybe he had decided to move to another line since she was taking so much time (and how annoying was that, anyway?), but she didn't see him anywhere. Well, maybe he had checked out and paid for his juice and already left the store, but surely she hadn't taken that much time. Or maybe he had put the juice back, since it was so obviously a contrivance to be able to speak to her. He probably hadn't really wanted it, and since she had obviously not been interested in continuing the conversation, maybe he'd just slunk away.
Oh well. She shrugged and walked out to her car, swinging the plastic bag by the handles.
* * *
When she got back to the store, Jason was behind the counter, listening politely to an elderly, white-haired gentleman who seemed to be telling a lengthy story about his involvement in the Boer War. Oh, surely that couldn't be right! That would make him, what? Well over 100 years old. She must have misunderstood. She grinned at Jason over the old man's shoulder as she walked by the counter into her office, where she filled Sophie's bowl with dry cat food.
Sophie, curled in the middle of a pile of paperwork in the desk, glared at Sarah, jumped down, and began eating. Sarah stroked the cat's soft fur and said, "Sorry, dear. I won't forget again." Sophie sniffed as if to say, "Who are you kidding?" and bent back to the bowl, her tail straight out behind her in her unmistakable "you're completely unimportant to me--step on me at your own peril" pose. When she was happy and contented, she would curl her tail around her, and she sometimes liked Sarah to squat beside her and stroke her as she ate. Not today, though. This was eating for survival, because the way things had been going, who knew when she'd get her next meal?
"Fine, be that way." Sarah settled herself into the chair behind the desk, gazing up at the corkboard and admiring the new postcards. Then she dug into her bag and pulled out the card that had come in the mail. It was from her friend Esme in Louisiana. Esme was a romance writer, and hated computers. She wrote her books in longhand in blue fountain pen ink on yellow legal pads, and passed reams of curling yellow paper on to her long suffering assistant, who transcribed them for her.
Esme always managed to involve Sarah in her research somehow, although Sarah sometimes suspected that Esme simply made up questions to ask so that Sarah would feel like she was somehow peripherally involved in her books. It was true that she was thrilled (and sometimes embarrassed) every time she recognized herself in one of Esme's characters, or discovered an esoteric bit of information that she had provided, but she figured that throughout their friendship she had supplied Esme with enough funny stories and crazy characters to last a lifetime, and anyway there were surely reference librarians in Baton Rouge. Still, truth be told, she didn't really mind at all--she loved an excuse to delve into the old books.
"Hello Darling," the card started.
© 2002 Willa G. Cline