“Well, that’s one word for it.”
She reached over to my forearm and gripped it hard, her palms sweaty as she frantically looked from person to person as her smile widened. “There are so many people here. That woman has a dog! Oh! That one is wearing… What are those shoes? Those better be recycled material.”
I followed her gaze to a middle-aged woman wearing bright-orange Crocs. I shook my head and guided her to the shopping carts. Her eyes went wide when I pushed one right at her.
“Wh— Um, well,” she stuttered, her face getting red again. “This basket is for food, right?”
“Correct.” I jutted my chin toward a couple walking by us. They’d filled their cart with beer, hotdogs, toothpaste, and a swimsuit. All the essentials. I wished I was heading where they were going. “Now, I have somewhere to be in an hour, so let’s go.”
“Other tenants to attend to?” she asked, frowning as she studied the couple and pushed the shopping cart down the way toward the pastries.
“Something like that, yeah.”
She reached over to touch a loaf of bread before furrowing her brows and giving me a look that twisted my gut. She was lost. Out of her element. And yeah, I thought she was an airhead, but she could easily be taken advantage of, and that didn’t sit right with me.
“You want some help with basics?”
“Basics. Yes. Basics sound perfect.” She exhaled and the muscles around her shoulders relaxed.
I took the cart from her. “Okay, bread, eggs, milk. Peanut butter and jelly. Snack foods. You always need snack foods. You mentioned salads? Well, they have premade ones here. Can’t say they are great, but it’ll do the job.”
“Are these products safe and green?”
“Green?”
“Organic. Not grown with hormones or pesticides.”
“Ah, well, they have a small organic section.” I ran a hand over my face. Looking fororganicfood at a supermarket was the last thing I wanted to be doing. She didn’t seem to listen though. She walked up right next to some guy, not abiding by the unwritten rule of not getting too close to strangers, and she bent down to examine the cucumbers. She tapped her finger to her lip and nodded to herself before reaching over to rub her finger over it.
What was so interesting? They were goddamn cucumbers.
“Nora,” I said, my voice a little harsher than I intended. “Fifty minutes. Stop wasting time staring at a cucumber.”
“Hm.” She stood up, grabbed one, put it back, and then picked it up again. She held it up and eyed it like it had all the answers to her problems.
It was green, just like the last two she’d held.
She clicked her tongue and set it next to an identical one, her gaze darting between the two. “I mean…how do I decide?”
“This one.” I grabbed the one on the left for no other reason than it was closer to me. I set it in the cart, and she shook her head.
“No, not that one. Nope.” She took it out, and my eyes about bugged out of my head.
“They areall the same,” I said, my voice getting tighter. What a complete waste of time. “They are cucumbers. Pick one. This one, that one. It doesn’t matter!”
She sighed like I’d told her plants were actually robots, but she finally put one in the cart.
The rest of the produce went about the same. She eyed all the pieces and couldn’t make up her goddamn mind if she wanted them or not.
The next four aisles were a similar form of torture, but we made progress with fifteen minutes to spare. It was hard not to notice the blush on her cheeks and the way she seemed to study every single thing we walked by. There was no doubt we could spend hours here, and it was baffling to think she had never stepped foot in a place like this before. No late-night runs for snacks, or a one-stop-shop trip for food, clothes, and beer. The woman had everything handed to her, all the time, and while her privilege annoyed me…she wasn’t entirely horrible. She held a green towel to her face and ran it over her skin, her lips turning down in a frown. Then, she set it back and tried a different one.
After letting out a contented sigh, she finally put it in the basket. Her toothbrush selection process was the same. She picked up a pink-and-purple one, and a white-and-black, and studied the back of each with furrowed eyebrows. As she read, she sucked part of her lip into her mouth.
Wait. What the hell was I doing? Watching her facial expressions? I shook my head to focus. I didn’t stare at her at all as she perused the medicine aisle.
“Okay, time for the checkout.”
“Checkout. Right.” She swallowed and pushed her now full cart toward the aisles filled with people. It was a Sunday afternoon—right in the prime of shopping—and it would take forever. I sent a quick text to my buddy canceling our plan to play tennis and forced a smile at Nora. Her attention wasn’t on me though. It was the outside section, and her already large eyes grew four times their size. “Oh,” she said, sighing as she pointed to it. “I need to… Can I go look?”
