Ava parked her car near the Goodwill truck at the back of the lot at Walmart after work the next day. Her plan was exercise, but the walk to the door of the big-box store would be the totality of her day’s exertion. She wasn’t rabid about exercise, far from it, but she had heard about weight all her life from her mother, how it crept up, how it stuck, how the menace of it changed a body from a young and vital one to a bulbous old one, a beautiful face embedded in the fatty rolls of a large head. She vowed to avoid having more of her than what she wanted. She’d planned to go to the Y and walk for half an hour on the elliptical, but her car with its own stubborn mind wouldn’t make the turn to the gym. She tried. Instead Ava put on her workout clothes after her last meeting, cut out early, and headed to get a few groceries, mostly for her mother. The town hadn’t had a Super-Walmart for that long, but Ava still tried to avoid it. The store was too big, not a store at all, but a big-box store, like entering a charmless small town. She hated the epic trek from apples to Preparation H, the awful cool-blue light that made the rows of Tide, ice pops, the plastic toxic-green gleam of Mountain Dew look like they belonged on an autopsy table. This was not experience-shopping, but necessity shopping.
The trailer truck door was open and a large white woman sat in a folding chair in front of the opening. Her job seemed to consist of waiting long intervals for someone to drop off plastic bags full of the junk they couldn’t give away at their yard sales. Ava clicked her car locked, positioned her purse under her arm. The woman looked up at her but did not speak. Ava nodded in the woman’s direction. How in the world did she pass the time with no book, no radio, just the blacktop vista of the dullest parking lot on the planet? On the back of the Goodwill truck over the woman’s head were two large signs: NO DUMPING and PLEASE DO NOT TAKE DONATED ITEMS. Nothing in this scene would have been remarkable to Ava, except she noticed a child’s bicycle with a pink banana seat in the small pile of trash bags full of clothes, garish toys made of indestructible plastic and too many housewares straining for escape against the flexible sides.
“Look at that bicycle,” Ava said. “You know I had one like that.”
“Mine was purple,” the woman replied.
“No tassels. That’s a shame.” Ava walked over to the donation heap, held the handlebars of the small bicycle, and examined the scratched-up blue and white frame. “Can I buy it?”
“You have to go to the store. We’re not allowed to sell anything out here.”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
The woman looked Ava over. Ava imagined that the woman saw Ava’s flat stomach, low percentage of body fat, no telltale spread of her nose and face. “Good for you,” the woman said. “You know they’ve got plenty of tricycles in Walmart.”
Ava laughed and let the bicycle fall back onto the plastic bags. “You are the first person I’ve told. I don’t think I’ve said it out loud until now.”
“We aren’t even that close.” The woman managed a half-smile. “Come on to the store in the next couple of days. We’ll have put this stuff out by then.”
“I guess it can wait,” Ava said and rubbed along her belly, as she had seen so many other expectant moms do. “She won’t ride the thing for years. I probably have some time.”
“I’ll see you,” Ava said and lifted her hand in almost a salute. Ava had no idea what she’d do with that beat-up old bike. She was just being spontaneous. Nothing wrong with that. Though it was just about three-thirty, the parking lot was three-quarters full. The parking lot was always at least three-quarters full. Ava wished for the hundredth time in her life that she’d had a twin. With a twin she could share everything, tell all her secrets, her fears. She would know how she looked. How she really looked, without the filter of her own happiness or depression. For the hundredth time she scolded herself for having the most narcissistic wish in the world. Who wishes for another self, another body just to see your own fool face?
She hated coming to Walmart at all and mostly avoided it, but it was too much effort to find a mom-and-pop store or make the forty-minute trek all the way to Hickory for a better selection or a quainter setting. Ava, like most other people in town, found her stubborn car turning into the Walmart parking lot nine times out of every ten, her resolve to shop local gone again. Walmart had become for most people in town the only shopping for miles. That song that was driving her crazy kept running through her head. All that glitters is gold, all that glitters is gold. Only shooting stars break the mold. But no way could she make out most of the lyrics. She reminded herself to look up the song so she could at least sing a verse. Is that what old people do? Probably. New music was as foreign to her now as it had been to her mother when she was a teenager. Back then she’d wondered how anyone avoided music, how the newest raps, the inevitable boy bands, how in the world did old people fail to notice?
She would not go to the office supplies. For once she would stay out of that aisle. Last year during the back-to-school sale she had bought a hundred notebooks at ten cents each. The clerk had asked her if she were a schoolteacher. She had nodded in a noncommittal way in case anyone who knew her overheard the conversation.
Ava would tell Henry about the pregnancy in a week, two at the most. He would not share her excitement, only her worry. Ava didn’t honestly know exactly what he’d think. Even after seventeen years with him, she still felt love, she felt loyalty, but she couldn’t claim to really know what the hell he wanted.