All the muscles in Cherry’s neck tensed.Wow! News sure does travel on rails around here.
‘Aye, trauma does funny things to folk. Poor wee Sean. Although, he’s not that wee anymore. Still, I cannae help but think of him as wee.’
Poor wee Sean? What the…?
‘Aye, and poor Amanda. As if she doesn’t have enough on her plate without having to worry about her son’s love life.’
Why would Sean’s mum need to worry about his love life?Cherry gripped the pasta sauce jar so hard that it was at risk of nearly slipping again. The sensible thing to dowould be to return it to the shelf and leave before she heard something even more incendiary. But her shoes appeared to be glued to the floor.
‘I’m giving it one month.’
Cherry’s nostrils flared. One month. The fucking cheek of it. They had agreed to at least two. These idiots talked about Sean as if they knew his mind better than he did. It wasn’t his fault that she had doubts about her own suitability as a wife.
‘The thing about Sean Butler is he doesn’t think things through,’ the sharper-voiced of the two women said. ‘He’s always had a weakness for the ladies who drop at his feet. I mean, I cannae blame them, seeing as how he looks – the spit of his father when he was young – but he’d do well to recognise that he can hold out for the cream of the crop. No need to drop to his knees for the first woman outside of Kinshore to bat her eyes at him.’
Oh, right, so Sean couldn’t possibly have chosen the ‘cream of the crop’ for himself.
‘I heard she’s a poker player. How’s that going to work, withher away all the time in casinos?’
Had these women been talking to her mother?
‘Sean needs a good village girl to keep him right.’
Oh, does he now?She’d raise their good village girl. Cherry chucked the pasta sauce into her basket, along with some spaghetti and a tub of antipasti from the chiller cabinet. As she reached the top of the aisle, the chat moved onto Sean’s brothers – how none of them had chosen village girls, blah, blah.
Jesus, she didn’t blame them if this was what the village women were like.Wait until she reached the checkout. Yes, Sean had said not to engage them in conversation, but this…this had to be addressed.
Then, as she was passing the second aisle, Cherry spotted something that lit her neural pathways like an airport runway at night.
Something that would do most of the talking for her.
In one stride, her basket was lined up under the shelf, and she was pulling forward what must have been around thirty packets of condoms. This silly wee shop was about to be cleared of all its regular, ribbed, extra-large and extra-durable latex contraception.
Cherry strutted to the counter, where the women were still working their jaws, now onto Lorraine Kelly’s anti-ageing regime. When they saw Cherry, their focus shifted. Who was this provocatively dressed woman? What was she doing in Kinshore? And why did her basket contain the incongruous mix of pasta ingredients and an excessive supply of condoms?
‘Afternoon!’ Cherry dropped her basket onto the counter.
‘Oh, good afternoon. Did you find everything you needed?’ One of the women, whose name badge said ‘Elaine’, flitted her attention back and forth between Cherry and her shopping.
‘Yes and no.’ Cherry seized this opportunity. ‘You don’t have any more of these, do you?’ She pointed to the contents of her basket.
‘Do you mean the…?’
‘The condoms, yes.’
‘No, I’m afraid everything you see is out.’
‘Ah, shame. You may think it’s a little excessive, but it’s my husband, you see.’ God, she loved that word. ‘He’s kind of…insatiable.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Elaine laughed with little conviction and began scanning the items in Cherry’s basket, handling thecondoms as if they were used versions retrieved from the pavement.
Cherry thought it was hilarious how the women were more than happy to chat non-stop about someone else in public, but when that person’s wife did the same, suddenly awkwardness took hold.
‘Are you visiting Kinshore?’ the other woman, Shona, asked.
‘No, actually, I live here now. Just moved. Just married, in fact.’ Cherry met the woman’s eye and smiled with saccharine grace.
She watched the recognition hit. It was beautiful.
