Food.

After the service, there had been an overabundance of food left in her kitchen from well-wishers. Casseroles, finger sandwiches, even bottles of wine. With no desire to leave the house, this food had sustained her during her self-imposed quarantine. But nothing lasts forever, and a combination of consumption, expiration, and lack of space had her struggling through cans of soup and bricks of David’s ramen noodles.

She knew that she had to go out shopping, had to get out of the house, but she wasn’t looking forward to it. In an effort to avoid as many of the other parents at school, she decided to go to an out of the way Dollar Store during dinnertime. She had worked hard to move David into a good neighborhood, but along with that came the sort of busy-body, overbearing parents that could never quite understand why a single mom never had time to be at every single school and community function.

The squeaky wheel on the push cart, the half dead flowers beside the counter, along with the vacant expression of the cashiers and shelf stockers, made her feel as though she were shopping behind enemy lines. Under normal circumstances, she would never risk buying groceries at the dollar store, if only because the additional cost of the supermarket downtown meant that she would escape judgment from the more high to do parents.

Holly didn’t have the energy to deal with them under the best of circumstances, least of all after having recently buried her only child. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and the largest pair of sunglasses that she owned. A part of her felt as if she were shopping in an alternate reality, unsteady over no longer needing to buy David’s favorite foods or to make sure he hadn’t run out of deodorant or body spray. Another part felt excited at the novelty of the trip, like she was getting away with doing something moderately illegal.

She knew she’d made the right choice as she made her way around the aisles, unable to locate anything that looked as though it had come from a garden. Everything had been processed and salted, which was fine with Holly. Destroying her diet had been another fuck you to society during her self imposed exile.

She managed to make all of her selections in peace, her mood brightening slightly at the prospect of conducting the entire shopping trip without being seen. She pushed the cart to the counter, the layout of which gave Holly the impression that most people that shopped at this store didn’t buy anywhere near as much as she did.

The cashier obviously hated her job. Holly could look in her eyes and see the result of the slow, inexorable soul sucking experience of working for minimum wage in a run down store. She knew that everyone was dealing with their own set of problems, but Holly had a hard time not questioning whether the store caused the rundown attitude, or if the rundown attitude had left her with limited employment alternatives.

It was shitty of her to judge a complete stranger, but it was a relief to think about someone's problems other than her own for a few moments.

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Leaving the disgruntled cashier behind, Holly managed to load most of her bags into the car before a voice spoke from a few feet behind her.

“Holly? Is that you?”

Holly recognized the voice. As much as she didn’t want to speak to someone, she couldn’t ignore the hurt she heard in that voice. It was one of the other parents that had lost a child in the shooting. She forgot the woman's name, but she would never forget her voice, how it broke down into the primal scream when she found out why they had all been gathered in the tent outside of the school. Holly consoled herself that this parent was not one of the more overbearing ones, and turned to face her.

“Yeah. I….ran out of food.”

Holly was attempting to be polite, but not overly so. If there was a way to avoid the two of them making a scene, two strangers crying into each other's arms in the parking lot of a run down Dollar Store, she would take it.

“I know. Me too. Sorry, I don’t want to bother you. It’s just….nobody understands. How are you doing?”

Holly took a steadying breath.

“I’m...outside. That feels like progress.”

The woman grimaced, nodding.

“I think I know what you mean. Everyone thinks they’re helping, but what they really want is for you to hurry up and get back to normal so that they can go back to pretending nothing is wrong.”

That pretty much echoed Holly’s experience with her mother, but it felt reassuring to hear someone else say it. Her mother kept pushing her to shower, to clean, to get back out into the world. Holly understood that was how her mother dealt with loss. Her mother dealt with it by suppressing it, pretending nothing was wrong, moving on by way of staying ahead of the pain. It probably didn’t need to be said that many of her mother’s friends were the same sort of insufferable people that Holly had spent the past few weeks avoiding.

“I’ve spent most of the past month hiding out at home. I just wasn’t ready to deal with everyone. I’m probably still not, if I’m being honest.”

Holly wasn’t sure why she offered up that information. Maybe it was the understanding that this woman was going through the same thing she was. Maybe it was the camaraderie of two grocery shoppers gone slumming.

Rather than act offended, the other woman returned a lopsided smile.

“Me neither. I suppose that’s why we’re both sneaking around town picking up food like a couple of frumpy ninjas.”

Holly smiled back, happy that the other woman understood.

“I suppose.”

She looked back at her cart, remembering that a few of the food items that she bought were of the frozen variety.

“Well, I should probably get going before some of my stuff melts. It was good to see you.”

The other woman nodded, already talking before Holly had finished, in the way people sometimes do when the content of the conversation has ended and they’re eager to get through the obligatory pleasantries.

“Yes. You too. If you want to coordinate another late night shopping mission, give me a call.”

Holly said that she would, though she couldn’t recall the woman’s name offhand, let alone her number. She’d pretended she knew it by acting like she remembered the woman, which was enough for most people, at least in short doses. She knew that with the help of some savvy internet searching of recent news articles, she could have her name easy enough.

She finished loading her car, returned the cart, and waved to the woman before climbing behind the wheel and setting off for home.