Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe by Jennie Shortridge

Author:Jennie Shortridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Twenty-four

THE NEXT WEEK, MIRA PUSHED THE CART UP THE CLEANSER AISLE at Costco and added a six-pack of Comet to the shrink-wrapped 36-count package of toilet paper. She’d talked Gus into letting her do the Costco run this week, arranging for extra coverage while she was gone so that he wouldn’t have to do anything extra, or even make an appearance. She just needed to get away from the shop for a while.

She turned toward the back of the store, aiming for produce to pick up some fruit for the dollar bowl they’d started at Felix’s suggestion. She was beginning to think that her mind might be coming back. She could remember what items to buy once she got to a store. She could remember where she’d parked her car. Whether it was a miracle or the progesterone cream, she wasn’t complaining.

She’d almost reached the produce section when a large blue ball rolled in front of her cart, chased by a young boy dressed in a too-large black T-shirt and sporting a dirty blond mullet. He picked it up and stared at her, and he looked so familiar she said, “Hi.” But she couldn’t possibly know him. She knew no one in Seattle other than the people she’d met at the Coffee Shop at the Center of the Universe, and from the look of this boy’s mother and grimy younger siblings, coffee shops in Fremont were not high on their priority list of places to visit.

Mira smiled at the mother, a tired-looking woman of indeterminate age with the same dirty blond hair. The woman ignored her, wheeling in an arc away from her as though Mira might reach out and steal her children.

She knew this family from her years of teaching, the families who could only afford to live in trailers or basement apartments, the families who always seemed to have too many children, too many pets, and semioperable motor vehicles of one type or another. She tried not to judge them, but she always wondered why they kept adding mouths to feed, engines to repair or replace, when they had so little money. She wondered why they distrusted teachers and food bank volunteers, social workers and people who smiled at them in the middle of Costco, for Christ’s sake, just to be friendly. And Mira wondered why it always hurt her feelings when they looked at her that way. She shook her head and pushed out into the wide aisle away from the woman and her dirty children. No matter how poor you were, you could always find something to wipe your babies’ faces and hands with, even if it was the hem of your own shirt.

Later, in back of a train of overloaded carts waiting to check out, Mira saw the family again, one line over and two carts ahead. A chubby dark-haired baby stood in the cart chewing on the corner of a three-pack of Frosted Flakes boxes, and three other young children, including the boy who

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