Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
As she stood in the checkout line at Dominick’s Finer Foods, Marcy wondered how men these days survived. From the looks of things back at his “residence” hotel, Mike was living on TV dinners, cookies, and of course, Jack Daniels. For all their talk, all their cocky posturing, all their condescending certainty, it took very little for men to fall apart.
Take Hank. Big, tough, top-selling Hank. Had to be the protector. But threatened with a little separation, he puddled. Marcy stared at the head of the woman in front of her. Or had he? Marcy had been purposely driving thoughts of Hank away, trying to focus on April. But he kept elbowing his way into her thoughts: his big shoulders, his smile, his habit of listening so goddamned carefully to her.
Take Nick. He still couldn’t get it together. And it had been three frickin’ years since Marilyn died.
Take her father. Oh my god, take her father. Thanks to him, Marcy was pretty sure she had done more grocery shopping in her lifetime than any other woman her age. Because after her mother died, her father was too busy drinking to do what was needed to keep the family going. This included shopping for food. Her brothers were content to eat fast food and any crap that her father happened to pick up while on a booze run. She had to beg Mike to drive her to the grocery store. She had to beg her father for the money. At the age of twelve, she had to start doing all the things her mother used to.
She had enjoyed going to the grocery store with her mother, who’d shopped as if she were the queen of the A&P. The stock boys all smiled when they saw her. The cashiers loved to chat with her. Marcy could still remember, as a toddler, wrapping her arms around her mother’s leg in the checkout line and, when she was older, leaning against her as the cashier punched in prices. Oddly, Marcy felt closest to her mother then, even though the woman might have been chatting with the cashier or someone else from the neighborhood, not paying attention to her at all. This was her mother’s world outside the home. Perhaps that’s why Marcy always felt a strange tug when she saw women and their children in the store. It reminded her not of shopping with April—shopping with April was a goddamned nightmare—but of shopping with her mother.
Did April ever feel that comfortable, that secure, with me?
Marcy shifted her gaze to her groceries. Mike’s groceries. Groceries for Mike, who would never admit that he was on the skids. Got something in the works, he’d probably say. Not to worry. He wouldn’t want to talk about the obvious—and he certainly wouldn’t want to talk about Colleen. Colleen, on the other hand, had had no problem talking about Mike. A few minutes after Marcy and Nick rang the doorbell of the “Warrington residence,” as Mike and Colleen’s kids had been taught to say when they answered the phone, Colleen was telling them, over coffee and in explicit detail, precisely why Mike could not be found at the residence. Marcy noticed that the kitchen—the entire house for that matter—was spotless. It would show well. Marcy imagined herself pointing out the bright and airy great room, the fireplace in the kitchen and living room, the granite counters.
Colleen herself was very much together, as always: just the right amount of makeup, shiny black hair pulled back tightly, clothes that looked designed especially for her. But the bags under her eyes and the worry lines that formed on her forehead as she spoke told a less perfect story. That was the difference, Marcy thought: Women wear their pain; men simply disperse it among the dirty socks and underwear and fast-food wrappers. And bottles.
Still, when Colleen told them where they could find Mike, Marcy couldn’t help but feel a certain level of anger with Colleen. She supposed that if the situation had involved someone other than her brother, her oldest brother, her sympathies would lie with Colleen. But when Colleen shook her head when Nick asked if she wanted to relay any sort of message to Mike, Marcy wanted to slap her. He may have been a philanderer, but at least he was here, she wanted to scream.
Marcy took inventory of the items in her carriage. Apples, pears, bags of prepackaged romaine salad, whole grain bread, eggs, skim milk, yogurt. What would Mike’s reaction be when she walked in carrying bags of wholesomeness?
“Ma’am?”
The cashier was waiting for Marcy to begin loading her groceries onto the belt. Marcy glanced back at the woman directly behind her, who offered a tight smile that said, I don’t know about you, but I happen to be in a hurry.
Would Mike even thank her?
Would Mike ever admit to what he had done? To Colleen? To his kids?
And would April ever be able to understand how she felt right now, at this moment, trying to keep the worst-case scenarios at bay while she shopped—shopped!—for the brother who left her as soon as he possibly could?
“Ma’am? You ready or what?”
Now Marcy was aware of all the beeps around her as items in the aisles next to hers were scanned. She heard the murmur of conversation, the sudden call-outs in Spanish, the crying of a child. It was the crying child that got to her.
“Excuse me,” Marcy said to the woman behind her as she started backing up, pulling the grocery carriage.
“What? What are you doing?”
“Excuse me, need to get by.”
The woman frowned as if Marcy had just peed on her leg.
“Why not just go through?” the woman asked.
Good point, Marcy thought. But Marcy was determined.
“Don’t worry, your plastic surgeon will wait,” she said.
The woman inhaled sharply as Marcy all but pushed her out of the way. Marcy then walked the aisles of Dominick’s, returning each item in her cart to the appropriate shelf or bin. By the time she had finished, the crying child was gone.
It wasn’t until she was halfway back to the hotel that she realized she didn’t have her cell phone. She stepped on the gas.