Minutes later, I’m slinking out of Le Drapeau, embarrassed and empty-handed. Turns out that what was left on the overdraft of my bank account wouldn’t buy the pack of drawers and warm gloves I spent twenty minutes picking out. I wander down to the far end of the mall, choking back hungover, flat-broke, post-birthday tears and lamenting the fact that my five-finger-discount friend is locked up in the Nouveau Butterscotch, just when I need her most. The scummy arcade has been replaced by one of those anything-for-a-buck stores. The lone employee who made it in for her shift on this stormy morning hauls a series of big cardboard bins out front, as if the hordes of little old ladies who dribble away their measly pensions on hair curlers and peppermints and plastic flowers there are still coming today. She scuttles out of sight as I near the storefront, and I pick up the pace for fear that the reek of sweatshops and chemicals will set off a wave of sick. Until something in one of the bins catches my eye. Something shiny. A pair of metallic-black gloves, the cuffs bedazzled with bright teal rhinestones. There’s no rent-a-cop in sight. But there’s now a pair of criminally cheap, gaudy, glittery gloves from a cardboard bin jammed into my purse, as I make my way to the mall exit.

I wait until I’m in a secluded corner outside Pott’s Coffee before I pull out the gloves, and when I do, a crumpled twenty dollar bill comes tumbling out of my purse. I have no idea where it came from, until I do. Gimp must have stuffed it in there before he left me, and for a moment, I can’t help feel a bit like a hooker. A shoplifting hooker who was too dumb to dress for the weather and eat the free continental breakfast at the hotel. There’s a moment of moral quandary, where I think about going back to the anything-for-a-buck store to pay for the chintzy gloves. Or at least discretely dump them back in the bin and return to Le Drapeau to spend my new-found fortune on something to assuage my guilt. Like underwear. Instead, I stalk into Pott’s Coffee with my crumpled twenty and stalk out with a burned bagel and coffee that needed four sugars to be drinkable. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mall mirrors. The ones I used to preen in, imagining I looked like the sassy girls in tampon commercials. Now, I just look old and sick, and like an arsehole for not buying a coffee for the guy who drove me here. Back into Pott’s Coffee I go, to get one for ol’ Roger Leblanc.

“Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ,” Roger says, holding out the coffee he bought for me, as I pass him the one I got for him. “But if there were no fools there’d be no fun!” He gives me another fatherly wink. “So, I’m to what’s left of the mall down the Northside in Town with one of them stinky spruce. Yourself?”