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T here were certain behaviors that never truly got old, no matter how much Anna wished they’d go the way of the dodo or, at the very least, the way of electric seat belts. Could the residents of Aurora, townsfolk and tourists alike, come together and agree that hoarding bread and bottled water before a snowstorm wasn’t the action New Englanders needed to take when their town was only two and a half hours from Boston and had every major East Coast highway running through it? The boonies, it was not. Did they think one of the statistically snowiest regions in the country would truly see its residents stranded to the point of endless peanut butter sandwiches or—and she’d tried so hard to understand this one, she really did—frozen milk?
The small grocery store’s overhead lights buzzed a soft hum of disapproval, mimicking the mildly stern judgment of a tenured college teacher who hadn’t had to change their teaching methods in thirty years because their contract included a parking spot.
God, she hated this and was mentally kicking herself for not prioritizing appropriately. Without realizing it, she’d turned herself into one of those people. The bread-and-milk-ers.
Lovely.
“This is your own fault, Anna. You really should have known better.” The verbal lancing she gave herself wasn’t enough to quell her frustration, however, or bring back the past three hours of her booked-solid afternoon when it would have been smarter, though similarly impossible, to run to the store to stock up.
Through the miracle of scheduling and the desperate need to pay her mortgage this month, she’d stacked clients as close as virtually possible. Unfortunately, by the time five o’clock rolled around and she was finally able to shut her laptop and check her phone, it left zero time to analyze weather alerts or figure out what she needed to stock her house with before eighteen to twenty-four inches of heavy, wet white stuff started blanketing the area during the overnight hours.
Thank you, higher elevations.
Oh, her pregnancy-induced sciatica was going to love shoveling that out.
Anna tucked the shopping basket more securely into the crook of her elbow and stood as flush as possible against the bags of chips while a few straggling shoppers plucked two loaves of pumpernickel from the otherwise barren bread shelves. Along the empty stainless steel rows, a few price tags had begun to peel off. Several had already fallen to the linoleum floor, their sad presence having been plastered to the faux tile beneath the earlier afternoon’s most likely stampeding footsteps.
Every single one of the newly adhered tags was for a higher price. Fucking figures.
“I swear, I thought the local businesses saved their price gouging for the tourists.” But then, when had that ever stopped anyone with the appropriate resources from gaining anything they wanted anyway? Right on cue, Travis’s smug face came to mind. His charming smile and affable demeanor had been the very virtues that enabled the bastard’s vices, hadn’t they?
Anna squeezed her eyes shut. “Nope. We’re not going down that road. Not again and certainly not right now.”
Before her mental wherewithal could course-correct her even further, a flat feminine voice bellowed through the tinny PA system. “The store will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
God. What the hell was she even doing? To hell with the bread. Anna made a beeline for the things that had always taken up the highest places on her survival pedestal: high-fiber cereal, evaporated milk, trail mix, and an extra bag of M&Ms to go into the trail mix because the meager amount it inevitably came with wouldn’t cut it on a good day. And honestly, if her body was already moving on autopilot through a familiar circumstance in a familiar setting, that meant her mind had fewer opportunities to chew over the fact that she hadn’t dreamed about her mystery man in three nights.
Three nights. Three whole nights that, for the first time in months, had gifted her with a few hours of precious uninterrupted sleep.
And the most unnerving sense of disappointment.
The few remnants of customers shuffled past her on their way to the registers, just as eager to get back to their wherevers as she was. Except, their wherevers most likely included other people or, at the very least, a cat or a gerbil or something. Did people still have gerbils for pets?
Lost in a brain fog of Swamp of Sadness proportions, Anna filled her meager basket with whatever her fingers happened to graze on her way over to the candy aisle.
What the hell was his name?
Of all the lingering questions trying their hardest to make sure her now sleep ful nights were otherwise as unfulfilling as possible, that one took the cake. She’d never gotten his name. Oh, she knew he wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. That was why she had no problem spouting off at the mouth and aiming every ounce of sass befitting her hair color at his smug face.
But it hadn’t been smug, had it?
Her fingertips tossed another package of something or other into the basket. Ah. Chocolate tea biscuits. Sure. Why not?
“What if I forget him?” she whispered into an empty aisle. Already, the imagery of what little she’d been able to glean from his features seemed fuzzier than it had been, and she’d only ever really gotten that much of an eyeful—literally—the one time. What if the rest of him would soon be lost to other far more mundane but ultimately pressing thought cycles now that he no longer took up space in her sleep?
And then there was the ten-million-dollar question: why did she care?
A gnawing worry propelled her woodenly toward the only self-checkout register still open. When she finally took stock of what she’d collected in her wee basket, the true consequences of her fantasy man’s inexplicable absence from her dreams stared back at her. A few hours away from the largest late-winter storm to hit the White Mountains in fifteen years and all she had to show for supplies were two boxes of Fruit Loops that were very much sans fiber, chocolate tea biscuits, two bags of M&Ms—one peanut butter, one plain—a bag of grapes, four cans of what she thought were evaporated milk but two of which turned out to be sweetened condensed milk, and—she groaned—a pack of random cupcake liners that were usually stocked next to her favorite just-add-water protein pancake mix.
A pancake mix that, despite Anna’s best intentions, was noticeably absent from her grocery haul.
The PA system’s rusty crackle only added to her rising tension. “The store will be closing in five minutes. Please take your final items to the registers. Stay safe, everyone.”
“Wonderful. Just . . . yeah. Perfect way to top off my Friday night. Truly.”
Before she could officially work up a good wallow, her phone pinged with an incoming text.
622622 : This is a reminder that you have an appointment with Dr. Michelle Abramowitz on March 14, at 10 a.m. Please press C to confirm or call the office to reschedule.
Few things had the power to bring her back to reality quite like the very real and very little child currently stretching out her abdomen, discretionary allowances, and calendar availability.
Anna ticked off the days in her mind, surprised she’d forgotten all about her next OB/GYN appointment. But yeah, it was time. Sixteen-week checkup and such. It didn’t matter that, despite choosing the smallest practitioner in the area for the very specific reason of being around fewer clientele, Anna still always wound up in a waiting room full of glowing pregnant women with doting partners.
Partners who’d already taken care of the bill and insurance arrangements while the appointment was happening. Partners who had their thumbs on their vehicle’s automatic start button as soon as the appointment was over. Partners who’d made the post-ultrasound lunch plans the week before and happily took off work to spend the rest of the day beaming over Bolognese and baby talk.
It was a lot to come to terms with, no matter how hard she tried to punch through the reality of her situation, one that had become so different from the one her heart had begun decorating with ornamental trappings after that positive pregnancy test months ago.
Doing her best to shake off the chill of a reality gone cold, Anna tapped out a C to confirm her appointment and caught the eye of the grocery employee standing at the door, ushering everyone out with no small amount of let’s go, people energy. Anna had just plunked the last of her items into her shopping tote before the employee skewered her with an exasperated stare as though Anna had just used full-volume vocals during quiet time at the library. The woman tucked her elbow-length highlighted hair farther into her Red Sox cap and used her inch-long acrylics to direct the last of the pedestrian traffic, sans Anna, out of her store.
Because of course it was her store, judging by the prominent Manager taking up the majority of her name tag’s real estate.
Then she bobbed her chin in Anna’s direction. “You finished, hon? We’re cl?—”
“Closing. Yeah, I got that. Just bagging the last of my items.”
“You’d bag things faster if you weren’t on your phone.”
Anna paid for her items, tucked the tote under her arm, and didn’t even have it in her to belabor the point. Much. “You know,” she said as she somehow managed to propel her exhausted body toward the exit, “it’s just snow. We’ll be shoveled out an hour after it stops falling. This is New Hampshire, not Florida. We have plows and road brine vehicles, and last I checked, Aurora’s municipal budget had plenty of overtime allocated to the Department of Public Works for snow removal. It’ll all be okay. This isn’t our first rodeo.”
The woman curled her nose and wiped it with the back of her hand. The gesture didn’t need sound effects for Anna’s first-trimester nausea muscle memory to fire right up. It also didn’t need the look of abhorrent disdain sweeping back and forth beneath eyelashes the length of a mascara brush and currently sizing up Anna’s paltry purchases.
And, like, really unfairly judging her, too, it was important to note.
“Well, it sure looks like your first rodeo.”
“I’m not a tourist,” Anna fired back. “I know my way around snow.”
A perfectly plucked eyebrow inched toward the ballcap’s brim. “Honey, I don’t care if you know your way around a Zamboni and carve chainsaw ice sculptures in your spare time. The store’s closing in”—she squinted at the clock above the customer service desk—“a minute and a half. Some of us have our own families to get back to, you know. We don’t just take care of the town’s needs. Look, I’m glad you got your, uh, baking supplies, but the forecast isn’t getting any friendlier.”
Yeah, neither are you, lady.
“The storm isn’t supposed to start until after midnight.”
The woman narrowed her gaze. “Oh, what? Are you a meteorologist?”
“Obviously not. I just know that there’s no snow on the ground right now.”
“And I’d like to get home while that’s still the case.”
Out of gas and interest, Anna nodded her defeat and ambled past the woman. “Understood. Have a good evening.”
That was the thing with small tourist-town grocers who were stuck between the financial slog of winter commerce and the shiny spring promise of new vacationer dollars. Stress was pretty much the only thing holding them together until the short-term rentals began filling up over spring break and the money started flowing again.
Anna’s stark circumstances were more than a glowing testament to that particular plight, so could she blame the store manager for wanting to hightail it back to who or whatever was waiting for her?
Once Anna managed to tuck herself into her car and not snag her coat in the door, she punched the ignition, tore into the most easily accessible bag of M&Ms (peanut), and let the satisfaction of mass-produced chocolate cascade over thoughts that had grown far too punishing in their perpetuity.
As she chugged along through Aurora’s picturesque downtown, a vague awareness of blue and red emergency lights strobing out several streets in front of her did their best to impress their urgency. But her maneuvers were more rote than reactive at that point, with her foot automatically easing off the gas in response to the braking lights of the car in front of her. Soon, her brakes were firmly applied, and her Subaru became just another car in a long line of lemmings inching toward the precipice of whatever cliff life had intended them to dive off.
“Traffic. Of course. Again, I should have known.”
What she couldn’t have known was how, when she reached into the shopping bag to snatch up another fistful of M&Ms, the orange and brown bags snuggled side by side would completely erase any blue and red hues that should have been at the forefront of her mind given the emergency vehicle presence up ahead.
Instead, brown and orange melded together in her thoughts, replacing the sharp primary colors in front of her with the rich brindled gaze of a man who wasn’t real and never would be.