Aisle Seven
“Mom, Max put a cucumber in his pocket,” Sophie said.
“It’s for later!” my five-year-old protested.
“Put it back, honey. We have a cart.”
Max looked at me with his big brown eyes. Then he looked at the cart. Then he pulled a whole English cucumber, wrapped in plastic, out of the front pocket of his hoodie. Half of it had been sticking out the top the whole time.
He laid it in the cart very gently, next to the bananas, like he was putting a baby down for a nap.
“I was saving it,” he said.
“I know you were, buddy.”
It was Saturday, and I’d brought all three kids shopping.
That’s not something I’d recommend. Not at the Meijer on 28th Street in Grand Rapids at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning, when every family in Kent County is there buying the same gallon of milk. But it was my weekend. Brian had them every other weekend, and this wasn’t his.
So there I was. Sophie, eight, walking beside the cart with her hand on the side of it, the way she always does, like she’s helping steer. Max, five, wandering off every thirty seconds to look at something. And Rosie, two, in the cart seat, chewing on the strap of my purse.
Three kids. One cart. One mom.
Brian and I had divorced ten months earlier.
It was final on a Tuesday in January. Kent County Circuit Court, Family Division. Twenty-two minutes in a courtroom on the fifth floor. Joint legal custody. I got primary physical custody. Brian got every other weekend and Wednesday dinners. Child support of eleven hundred and forty dollars a month, calculated by the Michigan formula.
I kept the house. I refinanced it in my name alone in March, at six and seven-eighths percent, which made my stomach hurt every time I looked at the payment.
We weren’t enemies, Brian and me. We’d just stopped being anything else.
His mother, Carol, still treated that like I’d personally ruined her life.
Carol Haldane. Sixty-two. She lives in Wyoming, Michigan, the suburb, not the state, in a split-level with a perfect lawn. She plays bridge on Tuesdays and works the front desk at the Methodist church on Wednesdays.
She hasn’t spoken to me directly since the divorce. Not once. At Rosie’s second birthday party, which Brian hosted, she stood on the other side of the room and talked about me to Brian’s aunt, loud enough for me to hear.
She drops the kids’ birthday presents off at Brian’s apartment. Never at my house.
We were choosing cereal when she appeared.
Aisle seven. Cereal and breakfast bars. Sophie and Max were in a negotiation about Froot Loops. I’d said one box of something sugary. They each wanted a different one.
“Froot Loops have colors,” Max was explaining. “Colors are vitamins.”
“That’s not how vitamins work,” Sophie said.
“Then how come they’re so pretty?”
And then a voice behind me, sharp and bright.
“Well, well. All alone with three children again?”
