She pretends like she doesn’t know me, walking three or four steps ahead of me into the grocery store.
While I’m debating if I want breath mints, a pack of gum, or a random tabloid magazine like the one she grabbed the other day, I listen in as she chats with the clerk in her lane.
“My grandma is so ridiculous. I love her. She keeps sending me hundred-dollar bills, and I’m like,Grandma. No one uses cash anymore. Can’t support my online shopping addiction withcash, you know? I’m forever like, ‘Grandma, get me a digital gift card,’ but she thinks the internet’s for recipes and gossip, not for, you know, buying quirky custom T-shirts.”
“Oh, I hear ya, honey,” the clerk says. “Grannies are something, aren’t they? Mine’s memory is slipping, and I keep getting twenty-dollar bills in birthday cards. My birthday’s in March. The last one came yesterday.”
“I seriously love grandmas, but I’m sorry about her memory issues. Happy…five months after your birthday?”
“Thanks. Best five months after my birthday ever.” The clerk laughs.
Daphne laughs.
The guy behind me asks if I’m going to pick something or hold up the line, so I grab a candy bar, pay for it with a hundred-dollar bill that the clerk checks to make sure it’s not fake, and I pocket my change.
Daphne’s already in the dollar store next door, at the checkout counter.
I grab a random Halloween bucket and get in line behind her.
“No, seriously, I’ve been looking all over everywhere for these sticky notes,” she’s telling the cashier. “Why doesn’t every store carry cute sticky notes anymore?”
The employee doesn’t check Daphne’s hundred for authenticity, but when I put my Halloween bucket on the conveyor and hand her my hundred, I get the look and the counterfeit test.
And then it strikes me that two people cashing in hundred-dollar bills in a row probably looks weird.
So I stop at the car and have a short conversation with Angelina Juliana Priestly, then realize I can drive myself across the parking lot, so I do.
Daphne spots me as she’s leaving the market attached to the gas station.
I nod to her as I’m passing her on my way in.
This time, I grab an apple.
Just feel like it.
And the clerk checks my hundred-dollar bill before making change for me.
“They all think I’m passing fake money,” I tell Daphne when I get into the car.
She cracks up. “You look so suspicious, Oliver.Sosuspicious.”
We go three more blocks before she directs me along a set of turns that lead to a small pet shelter.
“Are we giving money away, or are we getting another road trip mascot?” I ask her.
She blinks at me.
It’s one long, slow blink that asks if I’d let her get a pet.
“How many years has it been since Lady Catherine Ophelia passed?” I ask her.
“Four. She died right after I moved in with Bea.”
“You haven’t wanted another dog?”
Another blink.
This one goes with a visible swallow. “I don’t want my heart to ever break like that again.”
