Chapter 7 Grape Thief in Aisle Three
Grape Thief in Aisle Three
“Costco is the tenth circle of hell, okay? I don’t want to eat a hot dog while I shop for shampoo. I don’t want to peruse TVs and meats at the same time. It’s Ikea, but less easy on the eyes. Home Depot, but with unnecessary, lukewarm food samples.”
Penn stares at me, expressionless.
We’ve just entered Mo’s Market, which is oddly crowded for a Monday morning.
I thought grocery shopping together would be a nice, easy way to kick off our clean slate, but alas.
We spent the seven-minute drive bickering over where to shop, what music to play, and why Penn drumming his fingers on the dashboard is annoying.
“Who doesn’t want to eat hot dogs while they buy shampoo?” Penn asks, throwing up his hands. “I want to eat a hot dog all the time. Like a true American.”
“Look how wonderfully curated this place is,” I insist, weaving the cart through the produce aisles. “And even better: We’re buying local.”
“But in the long run, it’s more expensive,” he argues. “And less efficient.”
“True,” I admit. “But I won’t need a compass to find the paper towels.”
Penn heaves an exasperated sigh, then starts casually eating from a bag of grapes he just pulled from a bin.
“Those haven’t been washed.” I’m, frankly, aghast.
Penn pops another grape into his mouth. “Some of us overthink life. And some of us live it.”
“That’s illegal, you know.”
“Call the police,” he wails, mid-chew. “Grape thief in aisle three!”
I seize the bag, tossing it into the cart. “Grapes aren’t even on our list,” I hiss.
While I don’t plan to be in this game world for long, I need proper sustenance. Love them as I may, Dunkaroos simply don’t supply all the nutrients required to put up with Penn Hayes.
“What about these?” We turn a corner, and he pulls SpaghettiOs from the shelf. “Do they make the list?”
I let my silence do the talking.
I’ve been searching everywhere for rules, but maybe I should be seeking out a sinkhole instead. Something to swallow me whole and put me out of my misery.
“Don’t tell me you have a problem with SpaghettiOs,” Penn says, sliding a look at his phone. He’s ignored two calls in a matter of minutes. “They’re a pantry staple.”
“For second graders.”
“Oh, but Gushers are okay?”
“They’re delicious.”
“So are SpaghettiOs.”
I take the can, set it back on the shelf, and keep moving. “SpaghettiOs are a subpar substitute for an actual meal, packaged and purchased only for convenience.”
“God,” Penn says. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
He says it right as we pass an elderly woman. Worried she’s overheard us, I avert my eyes, pretending to be engrossed in the nutritional makeup of lima beans.
“Cindy!” Penn trills.
I do a double take.
The elderly woman is Mrs. Baker, our old neighbor. The grumpy one who, back in reality, has been letting Theo Ford live in her carriage house. The woman who, for years, spent several minutes a day shooing Penn off her lawn.
“What a nice surprise,” Penn adds, as if she’s just invited him in for tea. “How are those voice lessons treating you? Am I talking to the next Adele?”
“Oh, Penn.” She laughs lightly as he goes in for a hug. A hug. “How’s your mother?”
“Très bien,” he says with a shockingly smooth French accent. Mrs. Baker loves it. I hate to admit it, but I do, too. He must’ve picked up a thing or two on his annual visits overseas.
Diane met a Parisian artist while we were in college, promptly retired from broadcast news, and now sightsees across Europe with her handsome boyfriend.
Penn’s happy for his mom—just as he was happy with most of her other boyfriends.
He likes to see Diane having fun, I think.
And he’s gotten used to doing his own thing.
Plus, Christmas in Paris sounds beautiful.
“By the way,” Penn adds, nudging Mrs. Baker. “Those caramel candies you like are back in stock. Two aisles over. By the licorice.”
I stare at him, momentarily stunned. A French accent is one thing, but now he’s also fluent in fellow shoppers’ pantry staples? What. Is. Happening.
After thanking Penn, Mrs. Baker winks and adds, “I’ll say hi to Melissa for you.”
He grins. “Please do.”
She waves at me while Penn grabs the cart and rolls along, whistling, like that little exchange doesn’t require explanation.
I jog to reach him as he curves around the aisle endcap and beelines toward boxed cakes. Which are also not on our list. “Who’s Melissa?” I ask. I have several other questions, but Mrs. Baker’s knowing wink makes this one a priority.
“Her niece,” Penn explains, tossing two boxes of Funfetti into the cart. “Cindy set us up a few months ago, and we did dinner and a movie. She’s nice, but we’re just friends.”
Dinner and a movie. It’s so classic, and so very unlike Penn, who I imagine as more of a darts-and-dive-bar dating type.
“ ‘Just friends,’ ” I echo, placing the cake mix back on the shelf. “Was that your choice or Melissa’s?”
Penn fights a smile. “Since when do you want to hear about my love life?”
“Fresh start. Remember?”
“Ah.” He nods. “Well, there’s not much to say. A little something here, something there.”
That sums up Penn’s dating history in the real world, too.
For years he’s tried on girlfriends the same way he dips in and out of jobs.
I will never let him forget the spring he got into making homemade jam, all because he briefly entertained the company of a preschool teacher with big Martha Stewart energy.
“Why just ‘a little something’?” I ask. For research.
Penn pauses in front of the frosting. “Same as you. I want nothing serious.”
My laugh is a firework. “Me? Nothing serious?”
“What?” He eyes me sideways. “Do you have a secret boyfriend I don’t know about?”
An entirely secret timeline, but that’s neither here nor there. “No,” I tell him. “But I’m not a ‘nothing serious’ type.” I raise my color-coded shopping lists as evidence.
“You’re serious about lists and dress codes,” Penn allows. “But love?” He drops two tubs of frosting into the cart and looks at me. “I thought you had—how’d you put it?—‘too many lives to live’ to settle down.”
“When did I say that?”
His features pinch, like he can’t believe my question. “Which time?”
My vision blurs, the aisle growing and shrinking in front of me. This Penn knows a version of me who wrote to Bridget about late nights with strange, sexy men. Not me, the serial monogamist. All I’ve ever wanted is to settle down.
Penn mistakes my silence for shame. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Wynne,” he assures me. “We both just do our own thing. And we’re happier this way. Right?”
I reshelve the frosting and nod, wondering if that’s true for me here. If it’s true for him anywhere. Maybe he’s tried to adopt his mom’s dating philosophy as his own.
His eyes meet mine, as if there’s more to be said. He steps closer.
“What?” I ask. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He bites his lip, drawing my focus to his mouth in a way that makes me blink.
Holding my gaze, he pulls a bottle of rainbow sprinkles from the shelf right over my shoulder and shakes it toward me.
I grab it, clasping my hand over his, and Penn startles at my touch.
We both look at the bottle, and at our hands, then at each other.
“We do not need sprinkles,” I tell him.
His mouth ticks up. “Sprinkles spread joy.”
I narrow my eyes at him, hot anger in my cheeks. “I feel joy.”
Penn laughs and wrestles the bottle from my grasp. He adds it to our heaping pile of groceries, which includes three varietals of Cheez-Its he must’ve snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
He watches, waiting to see if I’ll pull the rainbow sprinkles from the cart.
“Next time, I’m shopping alone,” I announce. Then I storm off, leaving the sprinkles where they are.
—
At noon, The Disco Diner is empty. A stark reminder of the offer in my inbox.
This morning, I replied to Sloane’s email as vaguely as I could without committing one way or another. I promised I’d be in touch soon, trying to buy myself some time to figure out my next moves.
Meanwhile, Penn’s right: We shouldn’t be open at lunchtime on weekdays. He reiterated as much over dinner last night, and I wondered aloud why I ever thought it was a good idea.
“You were being ambitious,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“But it was stupid,” I told him. “And obvious.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you don’t know until you try.”
Penn doesn’t understand. In real life, I don’t try until I know. I don’t just look before I leap; I measure angles and run experiments and ensure that I’ve got a parachute and a backup parachute. Then I leap.
But as we sit opposite each other in the back office, me going over the org chart while Penn rifles through boxes, hoping to find a uniform in his size, I’m not ready to leap so much as lunge at him when his phone rings for the zillionth time.
Penn’s alarmingly loud, standard ringtone is the hallmark of someone with bad taste and even worse instincts—and this marks the fifth in a string of suspicious phone calls he’s fielded over the last hour.
Each time, his eyes have snapped to mine before he either ignored the call or backed away, speaking in hushed tones.
When he sends the call to voicemail, I crack and whisper, “Are you dealing drugs?”
Penn sputters a laugh. “What?”
“Nobody gets that many calls. Are you the one with a secret relationship?”
“Right. Like I have that kind of time.”
Penn does have a lot on his plate. He’s sneaking in hours here and there at The Disco Diner before and after his shifts at Curly’s.
“Heya, boss.”
Penn and I startle as Theo pops up in the doorframe, his teenage face once again poking out from beneath an unbuttoned Disco Diner uniform. He must’ve scoured eBay to find multiple Noah and the Weekenders T-shirts. A true feat. The show lasted only two seasons.
Theo lifts a pair of holographic skates by their teal laces. “Look what finally arrived. Ready to take these beauties for a spin?”