“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.