Digging out

Debbie had liked to grocery shop.  She said it relaxed her.  Why this was Jonah could never figure out; he would have preferred to speed race through the grocery store.  But there he would be, idling next to the cart, as Debbie read a label on a product he knew she would never buy.  “And how many hours have I spent in Best Buy?” Debbie would pointedly ask him, but he thought this wasn’t a fair comparison.  At least at Best Buy Debbie could walk through the DVD section, scouring it for the classic musicals she loved.  At the grocery store there was nothing for Jonah to do, other than watch Deb read labels for products she would never buy.

After he lost Debbie he did not particularly want to go to the grocery store again.  That only worked for a couple of weeks, though, so he went on Thursday night, when he saw that T.V. was just reruns anyway.  The grocery store was fairly deserted: that meant he could just speed his way right through it, how he’d always wanted.

Except that he didn’t.  In the cereal section he stopped to read the label on Frosted Mini Wheats, just because he was curious.  And in the frozen aisle he spent a long time marveling at the wide selection of frozen entrees out there for people like him—people who didn’t have anyone to go home to.