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—