I wasn't sure how long to let this go on. Not very, I figured. Just long enough to make the point. She'd be angry, no doubt, but later, I had a hunch she'd thank me. She'd realize that when you've got a choice between having your purse snatched by your husband and someone you don't know, there are fewer credit cards to cancel when it's the former.
The car was parked in such a way that I could see the store in my rear-view mirror, and I kept watching for Sarah. “Come on,” I whispered.
And then suddenly there she was, striding toward the car.
“Showtime!” I said to myself.
There was no purse slung over her shoulder and, consequently, no groceries. Not looking very happy, but yet, not as unhappy as I'd expected her to look. Not running, no look of panic about her, exactly. Maybe she was on to me. Maybe she'd spotted me running off with her purse but hadn't let on. Maybe she was looking to turn the tables on me again.
She came up the passenger side, opened the door, and got in.
“God,” she said.
I was hesitant. “What?”
“We have to go to General Mart. I couldn't believe their price on romaine. I don't care if we can afford it, I'm just not going to pay that kind of price. It's an outrage.”
“But what about the other stuff?”
“They didn't have the fabric softener I like, and by then I didn't even check the steaks. I knew we'd have to go someplace else, so I just put back the sauce and decided to hell with it. So let's go.”
Okay, I thought. So she hadn't even needed her wallet, which meant she didn't have to go into her purse, which meant she hadn't even noticed that it was missing. It's really terrible when you've got a surprise all worked out and the victim won't cooperate.
As I backed out of the spot and turned left out of the lot, heading for General Mart, I pondered how long I wanted to let this play out. When she got to the checkout line at General? I didn't know that I could wait that long for the payoff. I wanted Sarah to learn her lesson now. The point would get made, I'd get my sense of satisfaction, and Sarah could start getting indignant right away, instead of later.
We were coming up on a light when I said, ever so casually, “Uh, where's your purse?”
And Sarah's whole body stiffened for a second, the way mine used to when I'd be on the subway and, for a moment, think I'd misplaced my wallet, and my stomach would do cartwheels. But I could reach around at those moments and feel my back pocket and be reassured that my wallet was in its proper place. Sarah was going to have no such option.
But then she laughed. A short chortle.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “I didn't bring it.”
The light turned yellow and I slowed. As it turned red, I said, “What do you mean, you didn't bring it?”
“Well, it's so heavy, I've started using this.” She leaned back in the seat, opened up her jacket, and pointed to the black leather pouch she had strapped to her waist.
“What the hell is that?”
“You won't believe this, but I finally decided to listen to you. I think it was that story about the woman who lost her winning lottery ticket in her purse that did it for me. Not that I've got a winning ticket. But this forced me to pare down all that useless crap I always carry around, and my shoulder even feels better not carrying all that weight, plus I don't have to keep my eye out for my purse all the time. Sometimes you're not the big stupid idiot everyone says you are.”
11
“what's wrong, zack?” sarah asked. “You don't look so good.”
“I'm fine,” I said.
“You sure? You seem a bit off.”
I wasn't sure at all. In fact, I thought there was an excellent chance that I would be sick all over the dashboard at any moment. “No, I'm just fine.”
“I don't know where they get off, charging that much for romaine. Do they think that people don't shop around, that we don't know that if we go down the street a ways we can get it for less? Maybe it's a convenience thing. They figure people don't mind paying more for something if it means they don't have to bother to go someplace else. But if you're getting several things, and you can save money on all of them, it just makes sense to go someplace else. Anyway, General has a pretty good butcher's counter, so we can get steaks there every bit as good as Mindy's.” There was a long pause. “Are you not talking to me, or what?”
“Yeah, I'm talking to you.”
“Tell me again what you got done on your book today.”
“Oh, some last-minute editing stuff. Finishing the last chapter. I'll probably send it to Tom by the end of next week.”
“Are you happy with it?” Sarah asked.
“Yeah, sure, I guess. I don't know. Probably not.” I glanced over at Sarah in time to see her shake her head and smile.
“You're always like this when you finish a book,” she said. “You read through it and think it's the worst thing anybody's ever written.”
“Even I didn't think it was that bad.”
“You know what I mean. You're your own worst critic. Is that what's got you? Letdown?”
“I never said I was down.”
“You just seem a bit off, that's all I'm saying.”
I didn't say anything. I had a lot on my mind. Jail, for example. As we drove to General Mart, I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror more than I usually do. I figured someone would be after me. Someone should be after me.
I had, after all, stolen something. But I was not, I told myself, a purse snatcher. Not technically. A purse snatcher was someone who ripped handbags from the clutches of their owners, usually little old ladies who didn't have the strength to hang on to them and who got knocked down in the process, suffering a broken hip. I had broken no little old hips.
I drove for a while without saying anything, then: “You're sure you didn't bring your purse?”
“Huh?”
“Your purse. You're sure you didn't bring it along, out of habit, even though you're wearing that thing on your waist?”
“A fanny pack.”
“Pardon?”
“It's called a fanny pack.”
I glanced down at her lap. “That doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't hang over your fanny. It hangs over your, well, it hangs over your front. Maybe they thought ‘crotch pack' didn't have as nice a ring to it.”
“They also call them waist bags, but that sounds like something somebody with a colostomy wears,” Sarah said. “Do you not like my fanny pack?”
“It's fine. I like it. I just don't understand why you decided to stop carrying a purse. You have a lot of stuff. You can't get everything you need into a little bag like that. You need a purse.” I seemed to be running out of breath. “You should really be carrying a purse.”
“Let me ask you a serious question,” Sarah said.
“Yeah?”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No, all I'm saying is, this is a bit of a shock. You live with someone for almost twenty years, you see her carrying a purse every day, which is, like, a hundred thousand days or something, and then, one day, without warning, she decides to go around with a fanny pack. I just, I don't know, I would have liked a little warning is all.”
Sarah looked at me and said nothing. There was a long pause, and then she said, “You know you just drove past General Mart.”
I glanced around, saw the market over my shoulder, and said, “Shit.” There was one of those concrete medians down the center of the street, which meant I had to go up a full block and make a left before I could turn around.
“I still say there's something wrong with you,” Sarah said. And then, like a bulb going off: “That reminds me. All this talk about purses.”
“What.”
“In the store, after you left, there was this woman, she started going absolutely nuts.”
“What woman?” But I had a feeling I already knew. A blonde lady, looking at garbage bags, who liked low-fat cookies.
“She was just up the aisle from
me.”
“What did she look like?”
If Sarah thought this question was unusual, she didn't let on. “I don't know, mid-twenties, thin, blonde hair. Wearing a white suit. She looked kind of familiar to me, actually.”
“You know her?” This was hopeful. With a name, I could get this purse returned right away.
“No, I just felt I'd seen her someplace before. So she goes, ‘Where's my purse?' You know, screaming that her purse is missing, and she looks totally frantic, which I guess I would be too if someone grabbed my purse.”
“What do you mean, grabbed it? Did she see someone take her purse?”
“I don't know. You just assume, I guess. She called down to me, standing by her cart, asks if I've seen her purse, like I'm keeping track of her stuff, and I guess I shrugged no, and then she ran to the front of the store, and that was the last I saw of her.” Sarah took a breath, made a funny expression with her mouth, like she wanted to say something but didn't know how.
“So it's like I said,” she said.
I was making a left at the light and heading back toward General. “Whaddya mean?”
“Well, you're the one who's always telling me not to leave my purse in the cart, and that's probably what that woman had done, and someone happened along and just took it. You only have to be looking away for a second and it's gone. And the hassle! You have to cancel all your credit cards, get a new driver's license and God knows what all. And then there's your keys. You figure, a guy takes your purse, he looks at your license and knows where you live, and he's got your keys. I mean, most guys probably take the cash and ditch the purse, but there's always that chance, right?”
“I suppose,” I said, pulling into a parking spot.
“So what I'm saying is, you were right. I guess it was just lucky that today I happened to be wearing this fanny pack, or it might have been my purse that got swiped instead of that lady's.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky.”
“Are you coming in or waiting out here?” Sarah asked, her hand on the door handle.
Come in or stay out? Come in or stay out? I had this small matter of a strange woman's purse in the trunk of the car. If I went in with Sarah, there'd be no opportunity for me to get rid of the purse before we came back out to the car, popped the trunk, and Sarah asked, “Whose is that?”
“Let me tell you about my new hobby, honey,” I could say. “I collect handbags now. From strangers. Sometimes they contain valuable prizes.”
But if I stayed with the car, what exactly was I going to do with the purse? I could hide it under the trunk floor, jam it in next to the spare tire. Or maybe I—
“I have an idea,” I said. “How long do you think you're going to be?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don't know. Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.”
“Maybe I'll whip over to Kenny's. You know I ordered that model of the dropship from Aliens? The one the Marines ride to get to the planet's surface?”
Sarah shrugged again. The mere mention of SF trivia was enough to shut down any further questions. She said, “Sure. Just pick me up at the door here.”
And she was gone. I backed the car out of the spot and pointed it back in the direction of Mindy's. While I was not yet prepared to come clean with Sarah, I figured if I could find the woman in the white suit, an honest approach was the best one. If she was still at Mindy's, I'd tell her my wife had asked me to take her purse to the car, and that I'd gone to the wrong cart and grabbed the wrong one. Not the truth, exactly, except for the part about making a mistake.
And it was an honest mistake. There had been no intent to steal anything. When you grab your own wife's purse, even if, technically speaking, she is not aware of it, surely that's not stealing. This was like, I told myself, going out to the parking lot, seeing a car that was the same make and model and year of your own. Suppose, just suppose, your key happened to work in this other car, and you got in, and started it up, and drove away, well, that wouldn't be stealing, would it? Anyone with an ounce of common sense could understand that. And this thing with the purse wasn't any different, so long as no one noticed that when I left the store I hid the purse under my jacket, and that I had looked about me suspiciously as I dumped it into my trunk, like I was dropping a dead baby in there.
I parked and hit the lock button on the remote key. I didn't want anyone else making off with my stolen purse. I passed by a kid who was rounding up shopping carts and went into the store, hoping that the woman might still be there. Talking to the manager, perhaps. What I dreaded was that she might have already called the police, but I saw no patrol cars in the lot, and a quick scan of the line of checkouts showed no officers. I did the same routine as when I was looking for Sarah, walking past the end of each aisle, looking from the front of the store to the back. I slowed as I went past the aisle where Sarah had been looking at pasta sauces and the woman with the blonde hair had been checking out garbage bags. There, still halfway down the aisle, was the shopping cart with nothing but a box of cookies in it.
For a moment I thought, Just put the purse back. Drop it back in the cart, let someone else find it. Maybe the woman would come back later, check with store management, and they'd tell her, “Lady, it was right there where you'd left it. If it had been a dog it woulda bit ya.”
All I had to do was nip back to the car, smuggle the purse back in, place it in the cart and—
And then the kid I'd seen rounding up shopping carts out in the parking lot appeared at the end of the aisle, reached for the box of cookies to put it back on the shelf, and hauled the cart back to the front of the store.
Out of desperation, I made one more round of Mindy's, but the woman was clearly gone. Although I'd hoped to resolve this situation by talking to no one other than the woman herself, which would have been awkward enough, I could see now I was going to have to make some inquiries.
I approached the woman at the express checkout. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is the manager around?”
She pointed. “Checkout 10. Wendy.”
There, I found a heavyset woman in a “Shop at Mindy's!” apron ringing through an elderly couple's groceries. Her name tag read “Wendy.”
“Pardon me,” I said, coming around from the bagging side. Wendy grabbed one item after another, passing them over the scanner. The couple both looked at me, wondering who the hell I thought I was, interrupting their business this way.
“Hmm?” said Wendy.
“Was there a woman here, about ten minutes ago, who'd lost her purse?”
“At this checkout?”
“No no. Not right here. But in the store. I understand there was a woman all upset about losing her purse.”
Wendy kept advancing the conveyor belt, scanning items, not looking at me. “I heard something, but she didn't ask me about it.”
“Maybe she talked to someone else? Or called the police?”
“If she talked to anyone else, they would have let me know about it, and if anyone called the police, you can be damn sure I'd hear about it.”
“You're sure?”
Wendy took her eyes off what she was doing long enough to give me a look that seemed to suggest that this was the sort of thing a person might remember, especially if it happened in the last five minutes. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” And I turned in a hurry, thinking that I better get back to the other grocery store, where Sarah might already be waiting out front for me. I got back in the car and started the engine, but before putting it in drive took a moment to assess the situation.
Why hadn't the woman gone to the store management to report her purse missing? She'd had a fit in the aisle. Sarah had seen that much. But what had she done after that? Maybe she'd gone out to her car, thinking she'd left the purse there. But she wouldn't have been able to get into her car, of course, because the keys were most likely in the purse. Unless she didn't have a car, and walked to do her grocery shopping. There were hundreds of houses within walking distance of Mindy's. It was about a fifte
en-minute walk from our neighborhood. So maybe she walked back home, thinking that her purse hadn't been swiped, but that she'd forgotten it. But if she got home and found her door locked, she'd know she had her keys with her when she left, which would mean that she'd left home with her purse. And if she'd had her purse when she left, and didn't have it now, that meant that yes, someone had swiped it.
And furthermore: Who's on first?
Was there a point to this line of thinking?
There was an easy way to solve this, I told myself. Get the purse out of the trunk, check the wallet for a name and an address, go to her house, return the purse, offer a million apologies, hope to Christ she had a sense of humor.
An excellent plan. But first, I had to pick up Sarah. She had said she'd be fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was pushing half an hour now. As I feared, Sarah was already standing out front, weighed down with four white plastic shopping bags.
“Pop the trunk,” she mouthed from the other side of the passenger-door window.
Shit shit shit shit shit. Wasn't this what went through my mind only half an hour earlier? That Sarah would come out and want to put the groceries in the trunk? Of course, my plan back then (it seemed like hours ago) was that by now the purse would be back with its rightful owner.
I shouted, “Just throw them in the back!”
“What?”
I fumbled with the power window switches on the armrest under my left hand. First I put down the left rear window, then the right rear, then the window where Sarah was standing. She had that tired, why-did-I-marry-him look on her face. “You figured it out, huh?”