South Dakota
Last Thanksgiving Rey hadshared full-on turkey and fixings with the team, courtesy of Uncle Sam, but this year he and Grace faced the maw of the freezer section in Murdo, South Dakota. Frozen pizza would never fit in the motel lobby microwave, and the frozen burritos ranked lower than an Army meal ready-to-eat. Maybe they should have kept driving instead of trying to create a festive lunch and movie marathon.
“Hungry.” He pointed at a stack of meals, then at himself. “Man.”
“I get the picture.” She wrestled the door open and handed him boxes for the cart. “Promise you won’t tell me the sodium content.”
“More, please.” When he raised two fingers, his neck hair prickled.
“I only want one.”
“I know.” He spotted the lady staring at them from halfway up the aisle. In her sixties, she was as colorless as Chris Deavers, his former captain and a Minnesotan from his football to his beer. He wore a pair of loose jeans today, not shorts, so she wasn’t gawking at his C-legs. Guess here they didn’t see many tan people cruising the frozen foods.
“You want three? Are you joking?”
“Leftovers.” He tossed a package of frozen whipped potatoes into the cart. He wanted to explain to the upstanding citizen pretending to read juice concentrate labels that he wasn’t raised with frozen spuds. He knew how to make the real kind. His mother had learned how to mash them with butter and milk, even if she put garlic and chiles in them, because she wanted her daughter and son to feel like Americans. TobeAmericans. “Thanks–trad–traction.”
“If you think I can turn leftover frozen dinners into casserole, you have the wrong woman. First, my mother makes turkey bibimbop after Thanksgiving. And second—” she tossed frozen green beans on top of the whipped potatoes, “—the stuff in those boxes does not resemble a real bird. It dissolves the second time you heat it.”
The lady over Grace’s shoulder edged closer.
Air expanded his chest, lifted his shoulders, and what remained of his quick snap muscles tensed to jump. Yeah, that would work in a grocery store. Dial down, talk to Grace. Tell her something. “Mamá.” Desperate, that was how he sounded. “Turkey empa–empa–na–da.”
Let it go. The aisle was not a dirt road. A juice can was not a remote trigger, and the old lady was not a threat. She was a lumpy retiree stuck halfway between social security and Sioux Falls, so if she wanted to be nosy, he had to let it fucking go.
“We could forget turkey and nuke lasagna.” Grace’s eyebrows pulled in, as if she sensed something wrong with him.
“Don’t care.” Cold air streaming from the open freezer didn’t stop sweat from sticking his T-shirt to his spine, and he knew he had to escape the surveillance before he freaked. Circling the cart was as awkward as a sixteen-year-old turning a car in a dead-end driveway, but he fled and left Grace to grapple with the stuck glass door.
Around the end of the aisle, he spotted a pyramid of yams. He focused on their shapes and tried to replace bad stimuli with neutral thoughts. They could microwave sweet potatoes. He thunked two in the cart. The noise brought him down a notch. Brown sugar from the convenient display, another thunk, and his alert level lowered enough that he could swipe a hand across his forehead. Next he added a bag of nuts. As he reached for marshmallows, the adrenaline crash made his hand shake like a bad axle.
Grace arrived. The delicate lines between her eyebrows had become furrows across her forehead. She rested her fingertips on his arm. “You know those are solid corn syrup?”
Up and down her fingers stroked, and he tried to match his breathing to her motion. He held his waistband away from his abs, daring her to look. “Five under.”
She sighed. “You might need to gain weight. I haven’t run in days. I’m as puffy as that bag.”
The motels they patronized didn’t have fitness rooms, but if they upgraded, he might see her in shorts and a sports bra, slick and sweaty.
“What do you think people here do to stay in shape in the winter?”
He lifted the bag of marshmallows to be level with her chest and waited until she looked to give them a squeeze. “Indoor. Exer-cise.”
She blushed.
Now the double-tap. “Need more cu-shion.” He whispered the punchline close to her ear. “For pu-shin’.”
As he expected, she gasped, her moist lips parted enough that he imagined how it would taste to cover them with his own.
Fuck.He’d dropped his guard, and there was the eavesdropper ten feet away, watching them, even though her cart already had carrots, canned beans and a plastic box of lettuce.
“Excuse me,” she began.
Grace wrapped her fingers on his arm as if she understood the source of his tension.
Here it comes.He covered her hand with his free one, needing as much connection as he could create.
“Cold one out there, isn’t it? Are you two from around here?”
