Every weekday at 4:45 P.M. the man comes in—he never brings a list. She is usually behind the counter at the deli slicing turkey, her brown hair held back in a net underneath a maroon visor, the store’s logo in white stitching across the front.
She hears him on the phone first, his voice a smooth, low baritone: How would two people get to see each other before the summer is over?
He listens, then a tender laugh tumbles out. A laugh that circles his entire body, that blends in with the bleeps of the checkout counter, the rattle of the carts, the soft rock piping through as kids and families populate the fresh A.C. with wet hair, flip-flops, and half-bared swimsuits—hungry and searching.
He says this last thing a lot. The deli woman has seen the man in here before, usually with his son. She wants to glance over the stainless-steel countertop to be sure, but she waits. He is picking up bags of crostini from the display with one hand. She can hear the crinkle of the package. She knows he’s looking at them, but also not. He’s got his phone in the corner of his shoulder and is holding the red plastic basket in his other hand.
She hears him say something that must be a nickname. Daisy Maisey, he says, hold on.
His face appears above the counter and she almost ducks.
He orders: “Three pounds of ham and American cheese.”
I don’t, either, but the kids like it. He says not to her but to Daisy Maisey. I know, I know.
The deli woman wonders what he knows so emphatically.
The man knows that he might love this Daisy, and that Daisy is a time bomb set to destroy his life in a five-month period—that he will be turned inside out, that this love will be a terror whispered in his ear in the blackness of insomnia, in the car midway home, and he will never recover, or, at least, his life will become unrecognizable from its original form.
What the deli woman doesn’t know is that, while picking up the crostini, the man is remembering a fight that he had with his wife in this very store. And that he knows, maybe, that the woman now slicing meats for his children had overheard it.
What the fight was about he could not recall. Then: cereal.
He had wished to let the kids have sugar cereal on Sundays. That was how he’d been brought up, but she thought it opened a door to worse things.
“A gateway drug?” He laughed, didn’t mean to, but then smiled—and repeated it. This did not please her.
She yelled, “It’s not funny,” and pulled her purse from the shopping cart, swung it back over her shoulder, and disappeared down the long aisle to go wait in the car.
