What keeps the place going, I think, is the lifeblood of gossip that pumps through its veins, rumors of intrigue to titillate an otherwise banal and slowly eroding existence. I have always liked to come into town and listen to the people talk, even if they never talk to me, or even if they are talking about me while looking at me from the white corners of their eyes. I will always be recognized as one of those Wakefields who live in the haunted house out in the swampland, and I must carry that haunting with me wherever I go.

“Do you always do the groceries?” asks Elizabeth. “What did she do before you moved back home?”

“She had a grocery boy.”

“Lord.” Her eyes turn heavenward. “If she got hooked up to the internet, she could just order all of her groceries to be delivered and continue marinating in that house like a chicken.”

I grab a cart, and we stroll at a more leisurely pace than I usually take on my grocery trips. The store is bright and blooming. Rainbows of fruit occupy large crates before us. Elizabeth grabs items at whim as we pass: kiwi, a bottle of mustard, Swiss cheese, bacon.

“You wouldn’t believe the pregnancy cravings,” she says while inspecting a box of cereal. “I used to hate mustard. Now I can’t get enough. I just want to put it on everything. Popcorn, crackers, bananas. Just everything. It’s like having the perpetual munchies.”

“So just like college, then?”

Elizabeth gained the notorious freshman fifteen—or maybe twenty—after an affair with a pot dealer her first year away at school, when I was still at home. She dieted and exercised intensely for months before the extra weight started to vanish, and this was only after they broke up for the fifth and final time. I actually liked her more with the extra weight, though. She had less to be self-righteous about, and she was pleasanter, and warm, and when she came home for holidays, she would share her chips with me. When she started eating drab salads, there was no more sharing, only an unhappy shoveling of leaves into her mouth, a glower across the kitchen table.

She picks up another box of cereal and says to the list of ingredients, “No. Now there’s a boy inside of me.”

“So just like college, then.”

The cereal ends up in the cart, and her hands find her hips. “Jealous because you didn’t get any?”

“You know I never wanted what you were having.”

She stops walking, so I am forced to halt the cart and wait for her to tell me what’s the matter. She looks suddenly upset, as if the fragile balance of carelessness and that faint fixed impression of a smile are straining under some ugliness breaking through, the first effervescent bubbles pushing at the surface tension of a pot heated almost to boiling. After a moment, the tension settles, but the laugh that escapes sounds high and false. “You know what’s odd? When you’re pregnant, everyone wants to touch your belly.”