Yoharie (part eight)

Yoharie

Valentine

(part eight)

He smiled at a woman holding tongs over the baked potatoes.

There was always a puny spud, a runt showcased in its foil wrap, and Val, thinking of the food they threw out, wondered why. Maybe for calories. Marketing ideas from Plenty House HQ could get uberwonky, true.

He tried saying it to her. “Take that little one. Only a hundred cals.”

She peered up, showing you-talkin-to-me energy, and he coaxed, “Come on.”

“How come you don’t have em with stuff?”

“Stuff?”

“Cheese. Bacon.”

“Cause you get that shit over at the fixin’s table. Sorry.”

(Well, they called it the Fixin’s Table.)

“How come I gotta walk? Get cold by then.”

“Nah. Those mutts are chunks of lava. You could pitch one through a window like a Molotov cocktail…” He considered this riff, and ended it. “Better grab that baby, ma’am.”

She took it.

He didn’t think he’d failed.

She had been shopping not for just potatoes, but the scones, a kind of weird house specialty. Biscuity, dry, orange with cheddar cheese, grey with blueberry, too sweet, kind of sickening. Plenty House, up at the cash register, sold variety boxes for Christmas (November 1 to December 31), bedded in candy striped cardboard and shredded green paper…

The box held not just two, but four. Disappointing.

He had bought a box for Dawn.

“You like those?” he’d asked, curious to know.

“Oh, I like the cinnamon. Your Dad likes peanut butter on the cheese ones.”

“Wow, I gotta try it. Probably improve with some greasing up.”

He had gone through the front door to make the purchase. Really to see Sasha, because of being fired that end-of-shift. For not, somehow or other, getting in this woman’s face enough. The alarm went off, and she was out the fire exit, with her…just deserts, Val would have said.

This was Donk’s theory, people stole to fill out the Thanksgiving board. “They pay for a turkey. Then they don’t wanna pay for anything else.”

Almost a confidence, coming from the guy who’d just sent Val downtown.

The Plenty House central office was a sad glass-front in a dead mall, and if you got canned, you had to bus in to do your paperwork.

“You don’t fit in well,” the woman said, not taking her eyes off his piercings and nails. “With the culture.”

8

Yoharie

Yoharie (part nine)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)