Chap­ter 31

As part of my new dai­ly reg­i­men of tor­ture, Nina has made it her goal to make shop­ping as chal­leng­ing for me as she pos­si­bly can.

She has writ­ten out a list of items we need from the gro­cery store. But they are all very spe­cif­ic. She doesn’t want milk. She wants organ­ic milk from Queens­land Farm. And if they don’t have the exact item she wants, I have to text her to let her know and send her pic­tures of oth­er pos­si­ble replace­ments. And she takes her sweet time tex­ting me back, but I have to stand there in the god­damn milk aisle wait­ing.

Right now, I’m in the bread aisle. I send Nina a text:
They are out of Nan­tuck­et sour­dough bread. Here are some pos­si­ble replace­ments.

I send her pho­tographs of every sin­gle kind of sour­dough bread they have in stock. And now I have to wait while she looks at them. After sev­er­al min­utes, I receive a text back from her:
Do they have any brioche?

Now I have to send her pic­tures of every brioche bread they have. I swear, I’m going to blow my brains out before I fin­ish this shop­ping trip. She’s delib­er­ate­ly tor­ment­ing me. But to be fair, I did sleep with her hus­band.

As I’m snap­ping pho­tographs of the bread, I notice a heavy­set man with gray hair watch­ing me from the oth­er end of the aisle. He’s not even being sub­tle about it. I shoot him a look, and he backs off, thank God. I can’t deal with a stalk­er on top of every­thing else.

As I wait for Nina to con­tem­plate the bread a lit­tle fur­ther, I let my mind wan­der. As usu­al, it wan­ders to Andrew Win­ches­ter. After Nina’s rev­e­la­tion that I had been in prison, Andrew nev­er found me to “talk,” like he said he would. He has been effec­tive­ly scared off. I can’t blame him.

I like Andrew. No, I don’t just like him. I’m in love with him. I think about him all the time, and it’s painful to share a home with him and not be able to act on my feel­ings for him. More­over, he deserves bet­ter than Nina.

I could make him hap­py. I could even give him a baby like he wants. And let’s face it, any­thing is bet­ter than her.

But even though he knows we have a con­nec­tion, noth­ing will ever hap­pen. He knows I went to prison. He doesn’t want an ex-con­vict. And he’s going to keep on being mis­er­able with that witch, prob­a­bly for the rest of his life.

My phone buzzes again.
Any French bread?

It takes anoth­er ten min­utes, but I man­age to find a loaf of bread that meets Nina’s expec­ta­tions. As I roll my shop­ping cart to the check­out, I notice that heavy­set guy again. He def­i­nite­ly is star­ing at me. And more unset­tling­ly, he doesn’t have a shop­ping cart. So what exact­ly is he doing?

I check out as quick­ly as I pos­si­bly can. I load the paper bags filled with gro­ceries back into my shop­ping cart, so I can push it out into the park­ing lot to my Nis­san. It’s only as I’m get­ting close to the exit that a hand clos­es around my shoul­der. I lift my head and that heavy­set man is stand­ing over me.

“Excuse me!” I try to jerk away, but he holds tight to my arm. My right hand balls into a fist. At least a bunch of peo­ple are watch­ing us, so I have wit­ness­es. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He points to a small ID badge hang­ing from the col­lar of his blue dress shirt, which I hadn’t noticed before. “I’m super­mar­ket secu­ri­ty. Can you come with me, Miss?”

I’m going to be sick. It’s bad enough I spent almost nine­ty min­utes in this place, shop­ping for a hand­ful of items, but now I’m being arrest­ed? For what?

“What’s wrong?” I gulp.

We have attract­ed a crowd. I notice a cou­ple of women from the school pick-up, who I’m sure will glee­ful­ly report back to Nina that they saw her house­keep­er being appre­hend­ed by super­mar­ket secu­ri­ty.

“Please come with me,” the guy says again.

I push my cart with us because I’m scared to leave it behind. There are over two hun­dred dol­lars’ worth of gro­ceries in there, and I’m sure Nina would make me pay for all of them if they were lost or stolen. I fol­low the man into a small office with a scratched-up wood­en desk and two plas­tic chairs set up in front of it. The man ges­tures for me to sit down, so I set­tle down in one of the chairs, which creaks threat­en­ing­ly under my weight.

“This has got to be a mis­take…” I look at the man’s ID badge. His name is Paul Dorsey. “What’s this about, Mr. Dorsey?”

He frowns at me as his jowls hang down. “A cus­tomer alert­ed me that you were steal­ing items from the super­mar­ket.”

I let out a gasp. “I would nev­er do that!”

“Maybe not.” He sticks his thumb into the loop of his belt. “But I have to inves­ti­gate. Can I see your receipt, please, Miss…?”

“Cal­loway.” I dig around in my purse until I come up with the crum­pled strip of paper. “Here.”

“Just a warn­ing,” he says. “We pros­e­cute all shoplifters.”

I sit in a plas­tic chair, my cheeks burn­ing, while the secu­ri­ty guard painstak­ing­ly looks through all my pur­chas­es and match­es them up with what’s in the cart. My stom­ach churns as I con­sid­er the hor­ri­ble pos­si­bil­i­ty that maybe the clerk didn’t ring some­thing up prop­er­ly, and he’ll think I stole it. And then what? They pros­e­cute all shoplifters. That means that they’ll call the police. And that would be a vio­la­tion of my parole for sure.

It hits me that this would work out pret­ty well for Nina. She would get rid of me with­out hav­ing to be the mean per­son who fired me. She would also get some pret­ty sweet revenge on me for hav­ing slept with her hus­band. Of course, it’s a lit­tle harsh to be sent to jail for adul­tery, but I get the feel­ing Nina may look at it dif­fer­ent­ly.

But that can’t hap­pen. I didn’t steal any­thing from the gro­cery store.

He’s not going to find any­thing in that cart that isn’t on my receipt.