He stood with his weight on his back foot. The store was bright and very cold.
Samantha had gone in four minutes ahead of him and was over in dry goods somewhere. He reminded himself that they did not know each other.
He put rice in his cart. He grabbed some cans of beans. He added them up as he went, to the penny.
A man in a Carhartt jacket stopped at the end of the aisle.
“You know where they keep the batteries?”
Marcus had walked past a whole rack of them by the registers, and his mouth was already open and his shoulders were already turning to take the guy over there.
He pointed.
“Front. By the checkout.”
“Thanks, chief.”
Marcus stood in the aisle and looked at the cans of food.
The woman at register four had a brace on one knee and a blue streak in her hair.
“Find everything okay?”
“Yep.”
She started scanning items. Marcus put his hands on the end of the belt where he could see them and ran the cart.
Four ninety-nine. Two twenty-nine, times six. The oats were on sale and he had the sale price and not the shelf price, which he would have to remember.
“You out on the Collegiate?”
“Yep.”
“My nephew did it two summers ago.” She turned a jar over and typed the code in. “He lost a toenail and would not shut up about it.”
Marcus lost the count.
He picked it back up from the oats and did the whole front of the cart again with her hands moving quickly and the machine beeping as she scanned.
“They’ve had the pass road closed off and on all day,” she said. “Cops everywhere. My sister sat up there forty minutes.”
“Huh.”
Forty minutes was not a wreck. He put it next to the rice and kept going.
“Anyway.”
“Yep.”
The total came up. Three eleven eighty-four.
He took the money clip out, and the roll of Vlad’s twenties out from behind it, and counted sixteen twenties onto the little steel shelf.
She watched every one of them.
She made change and put it in his hand.
“Have a good one.”
“Yep.”
He got the bags in the cart and pushed it out through the doors into the heat.
Vlad was sitting on the curb at the far end of the lot with the three packs and a bag of ice.
“Where did you get the ice.”
“There is a machine over there.”
Samantha came out eight minutes later with her own cart and did not look at either of them until she was past the cart return.
They loaded on the shoulder outside the store, where the highway ran back down into town. Marcus got his pack up and took two steps sideways before it settled on his back.
“Twenty miles,” Samantha said. “Back up the same road.”
“The woman at the register says there are cops on the pass road,” Marcus said. “Off and on all day.”
Vlad stopped with a strap in his hand.
“Say that again.”
Marcus said it again.
“That is not for us,” Vlad said. “Nobody closes a road for two people on foot. They are looking at cars.”
“Which we need.”
“Yes.”
“So we walk out of town on the shoulder in daylight, or we sit in the willows until dark and walk out on the shoulder at night.”
“We walk now,” Vlad said, and started.
“I want to say something,” Marcus said.
“Say it walking.”
They walked out along the shoulder with the traffic coming past them. After about a hundred yards Marcus spoke.
“I appreciate you didn’t throw me away up there.”
Samantha and Vlad kept walking.
“I know what I am. I talk to people. Up there I couldn’t stop, and both of you came to me instead of getting in the car. Thank you.”
He shifted the strap off the front of his shoulder, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll support whatever the two of you agree on.”
Samantha stopped in the gravel and turned around.
“That’s the worst thing you’ve said all week.”
“What?”
“There are three of us. By saying that, you just made it two.”