They laughed at the movie while they ate dinner. It was great that the apartment was still kind of clean from the weekend. She changed her boy into his pajamas, tucked him in, and then went to the bathroom to get ready for bed. She slipped into a fresh nightgown and washed her face, something she didn’t always do. She brushed and flossed. Then she went into the dark apartment and found her purse on the kitchen chair. Crispy walked up to her and looked at her.

“Hi, Crispy,” she whispered.

She got the bottle of medicine just so she could put it away in the cabinet.

When she was back in the bathroom, she looked at the bottle and said, “I’ve been in a bad accident.”

TWO

Things were still pretty awkward between Megan and Randy, and she hadn’t heard anything from or said anything to Amanda since the fight. But did she still go to the grocery store and buy dinner and stuff? Oh, totally, yeah, of course, of course, because life just keeps grinding on, right?

That day she thought, “Fuck it,” and went to the smaller grocery store. The store was for rich people, but fuck it, right? There were delights there.

She wanted to make something out of vegetables. The selection was small but everything did look so much healthier. There were summer squash the size of a baby’s arm and baby bok choy that looked clean and smooth and not like a bunch of slugs had been fucking and barfing on it in the back of a truck for weeks. So this is how the better half eats. She picked out two well-formed bunches of baby bok choy and put them in her basket. There was a wall of salad dressing in a refrigerated shelf that she stared at for five minutes. Next to that was a section for juices and anciently formulated teas with helpful bacteria. On one of the teas was a drawing of a thin female torso with a spiral on it that looked like a twister. Detoxification. Gotta get this inside me. It was five dollars. She picked up the bottle and stood in front of the case for two minutes staring at it. It was a glass bottle. She needed a sweet potato. They were two dollars, but they didn’t have those suspicious grey holes bored into them that she was used to coring out. That would be fun. Just wash it and bake it. That would be fun, yeah.

And something fun to eat. The snack aisle. Oh, yeah, I like this, she thought. Cruelty free agave dino gummies, gluten free cookie mixes, puffed and naturally flavored corn and rice balls, crackers made mostly out of raw seeds, a bag of dried Himalayan goji berries. Yeah, cool.