Page 38 of The Cadence

I was talking to one of the regular customers about her cat as I rang up many, many cans of his special food and a large bag of his special litter, when I heard my name.

“Calla!What’s up?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Kirsten, who stood at the next register. “Holy Moses, are you working here now?”

“No.” She pushed a few of the buttons on the machine. “I always wanted to do this.”

“You shouldn’t play with that,” I admonished. I bagged the last of the cat food and the shopper got on her way, leaving my lane clear for the moment. “Cully’s not here today.”

“He isn’t?” She pounded her fist on the keys. “How do I make it open?”

“If you’re not doing a transaction, only the manager can. There’s no money in there, anyway.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed—actually, she seemed pretty down in general. “I thought maybe Cully forgot to tell me that he was working right now, and that was why he didn’t meet me and the real estate agent.”

“The real estate agent?”

“We’re looking at houses to buy,” she explained.

“Houses to buy?”

“Why do you keep repeating me?” Kirsten demanded. Now she seemed irritated. “Yes, Cully and I are supposed to be looking for a house together, but every time I tell him to come meet me, he no-shows. It’s annoying.”

“Ok,” I said slowly. I was trying to piece together this story.

“Ok. I know he talked about the two of you moving in together, but I didn’t understand that you were considering a purchase.

I didn’t even know that you’d agreed to live with him.

” One thing I knew for sure, though, was that Cully didn’t have any money to buy a house.

He hardly had any money to get himself lunch.

Every cent he had went into his car, and he’d bought turbo stuff and spoilers and fancy tires, shiny hubcaps and anything else he could find to fix it up.

We didn’t make much at the grocery store to begin with and his parents were fine, but they weren’t rolling in wealth.

But someone was: Kirsten’s grandma. “She’s excited that I want to live up here, so she’s paying,” she told me, rolling her eyes and nodding. She’d done that before and I was aware that it was supposed to signal something, some secret subtext or meaning, but I didn’t understand what it was.

“Are you saying that you actually don’t want to live here?” I clarified.

“Why would I? It’s so boring compared to The—”

“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” I interrupted. “But why would you want to buy a house, then?”

Well, that was more complicated. She talked for a while about saving money because of property taxes, but it didn’t seem like she really understood what she meant and I didn’t have a clue, either.

I did gather that Cully wanted to stay in Michigan and he wasn’t interested in moving far away, not even to The City.

“I could stay here and we could be together, at least for a while. He’s ok, I guess,” she told me. The words by themselves weren’t very warm and fuzzy, but it was the way she spoke that caught my attention. Her voice almost trembled and then I understood something.

“You really like him,” I stated. “You really, really like him.”

“No!” she scoffed. “He’s totally different from the guys I’m usually with. He lives with his parents and works in a grocery store, and I’m the girl who was fucking one of the Woodsmen players!”

“So what? Are you saying that you’re too good for Cully because of that?

You were going at it with him in a puddle of rodent pee.

And that Woodsmen player doesn’t seem to like you much now!

” I told her. “You threw yourself at him when you invited yourself over to my house—I mean, over to Will’s house.

Neither of them wanted anything to do with you. ”

I expected her to get mad right back, but instead? Holy Moses.

“Here,” I told her, and took out the box of tissues that I kept under the register. “Are you crying over Cully?”

“I’m trying everything to make him like me more,” she said. “I’m not wearing any panties and I go down on him whenever he wants.”

“Oh…”

She angrily yanked a tissue free of the box and swabbed it around her face. “He should be following me around, drooling. But here I am at this grocery store looking for him instead!”

“I know he likes you.”

Her eyes widened and she stared at me hopefully. “You know that?”

“Well, didn’t he suggest moving in together?” I reminded her.

“Yes, but then he came over to meet my grandma and that was when he started acting strange. She was like, ‘In your new house, who’s going to pay for the utilities? Who will plow the driveway?’” Kirsten tossed her tissue and snatched another.

“Cully and I went out afterwards and he was asking me the same things. I told him we’d actually be saving money because of property taxes, and he got all scared about having to pay those.

Then he said he couldn’t go look at the next place with the real estate agent and he didn’t show up for the one today, either!

” She sniffled. “I need to yank down his pants and go to town, and then we’ll be ok.

I have a really agile tongue and my throat—”

“I don’t feel like this is a problem that a blowjob can solve,” I suggested, and she seemed a little shaken by that.

“Kirsten, he has a point, and so does your grandmother. You should make a list of all the expenses that go along with a house. Not just the money you’d have to spend to buy it, but how much it will cost day to day, too. ”

“That sounds really, really dull,” she told me.

I looked around the store, but things were quiet with only a few customers.

I had more time to talk. “It is dull, but you have to do it. I didn’t know about budgeting and keeping track of money either,” I said earnestly.

“I had to learn that from my grandma and now I’m learning even more stuff, like about how to register a business name and how to make spreadsheets, too!

” I smiled in satisfaction. I was going to do things the right way so that no one could suddenly say, “We’re taking this house!

” and I’d have to live in my car. I had been such a mess after the funeral that I hadn’t been making good decisions, but I was starting that now.

She looked at me and yawned. “Were you just talking? My brain does this thing to protect itself against extreme boredom,” she explained. “It’s like I’m physically here but mentally, I’m doing something interesting. It’s so helpful when you’re supposed to listen to professors.”

“Never mind!” I seethed. “I don’t know why I would have tried to help—”

“Miss? Excuse me, I have a complaint.”

I knew that voice and I crossed my arms as I stared down the man who had entered my checkout lane. “No,” I told him. “No, we are not doing the limp food game, not today! I know you’ve been bringing weird stuff into the store to play some trick, and it’s disgusting. Get out of here.”

“There’s nothing limp,” he said, and his face lit with a smug smile. “It’s firm and erect!”

“Ew, what is that?” Kirsten squealed as he held up a large, purple cylinder. “It looks like you lubed up an eggplant!”

“Holy Moses, did you?” I asked him. “Get out of this store!”

He didn’t. He lunged at me with the greasy, shiny vegetable and I jumped backwards. “Kirsten, run!” I yelled. “He’s crazy!”

“Back off, perv! Leave her alone!” she shouted at him, and I saw her aiming a bright pink canister in his direction.

“No, don’t spray that!” I ordered, but as I spoke, he lunged at me again and hit my face with the eggplant. Unfortunately, it was very, very firm. “Ow!”

She sprayed and I ducked as it hit the pervert full in the face.

He howled just like an injured animal and clawed at his eyes with the hand that didn’t clutch the slippery vegetable.

The store manager came running and immediately coughed and blinked, waving her hands in front of her face to clear the air. “What happened out here?” she croaked.

Kirsten had the answer. “I maced him! Call nine-one-one!” she shrieked.

A little while later, I figured that I’d better let Will know what had happened, because word would get around to him somehow.

But by the time a firefighter retrieved my pocketbook with my phone from the store, it was too late.

As I sat on the curb and poured another bottle of water over my eyes, his car came screeching into the parking lot.

The police were here and no other member of the public had been allowed so close to the grocery store, but this town was in Woodsmen territory.

The officers parted like the Red Sea to let him pass.

I scrambled to my feet as he approached, and I realized that one of his emotions was very, very obvious at the moment: fury.

“What the hell happened?” he boomed out.

Kirsten, who had been trying to worm her way into another interview with a local TV reporter, abandoned the effort and ran over to answer his question. “She got attacked by a pervert with a food fetish! But I saved her,” she said triumphantly.

“You got attacked?” He reached for me and I got folded into his big arms.

“I’m fine,” I told him, but I had been shaken up. It wasn’t every day that you got smacked with a frozen eggplant coated in personal lubricant, which was how the police had described the weapon.

“I should have known this would happen,” I heard Will mutter.

“How would you have guessed that I would get hit with a vegetable? No one could have,” I said.

He took my chin in his palm, cupping it carefully. “Is that what made the mark on your cheek? Someone hit you? Where is he?”

Kirsten pointed toward the police cars and gave a recap of the incident, highlighting her own heroics with the pepper spray and how she’d practically carried me out of the building after incapacitating the pervert.

It was true that once he was down, screaming and moaning, she had also kicked him in the balls before we’d run outside.