“You have to eat it!” the man insisted.

And then he was gone.

Kyle hung up the phone before it was answered. The bell above the door rang as the homeless man shoved it open and staggered across the sidewalk into the street, where a too-fast pickup truck honked and swerved around him.

“Fuck you!” the man yelled at the departing pickup.

Kyle watched him knock on the front window of a store across the street, then stumble down the sidewalk out of sight. Sitting back down, he attempted to return to his book, but the mood was gone, and he couldn’t get into the story. Luckily, a customer came in, a woman he didn’t recognize. He smiled at her, asked if she needed any help, and when she said, no, she was just browsing, he nodded and then put on some music.

2

Anita went to the nursery at lunch.

She hadn’t intended to go back at all, at least not by herself, but the text Steven had sent her had been a little too Fatal Attraction for her taste, and she felt the need to meet in person and put a definitive end to all of this. It was her own fault for not doing so earlier. At every juncture, she’d either continued onward or left things ambivalent. Even yesterday, standing him up, she hadn’t clearly put on the brakes.

Mostly because she hadn’t wanted to.

She wanted to now, though. She wasn’t sure when the epiphany had come, but this morning, helping Iris Jensen pick out a new pair of glasses, Iris Jensen who had been her eleventh grade biology teacher, Iris Jensen who had been married to Coach Thomas for over thirty years, Anita realized that she couldn’t lose what she had, that she was lucky to have the life she had with Kyle, with Nick, and it would be crazy for her to throw it all away. What had she been thinking? How had she ever let it get this far? Maybe, between financial problems with the store and the tribulations of raising a teenager, they had let the romance gradually slip away, but that was no reason to start something with someone else. Kyle wasn’t hitting on young women buying used copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. Why had she succumbed to Steven’s flirtations?

No matter. She was stopping it now, before things went too far, before what happened could not be forgiven. She loved Kyle, and if their life together wasn’t a passionfest, that was on her as well as him. It was a cliché trotted out by every fake-credentialed relationship adviser on every daytime talk show, but the two of them needed to talk. They needed to communicate.

There were no other cars in the nursery parking lot when Anita arrived, and that gave her pause. She’d been hoping to talk to him when others were around, wanting the safety of witnesses, and she almost decided to drive away and come back later, but at the last minute, she parked in the gravel next to the open gate and shut off the engine. She waited, hoping he might come out, hoping she wouldn’t have to leave the car, but when he didn’t emerge after several minutes, she grabbed her purse, got out, and walked into the nursery. The register was unattended, and the potting shed behind it was empty.