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“Who should I write this to?” Bowie asked. “What’s your name, honey?”
He’d directed that question to a tiny girl perched on her dad’s shoulders. At that height, she and Bowie were almost eye-level. She leaned forward and whispered something and he grinned at her.
“Got it. I’ll write your name and then sign mine, but I’ll keep them both a secret,” he whispered back. His voice was deep, though, and naturally loud. When we’d floated together on Laurel Lake, his words had been amplified by the smooth water and had reached every shore. His whisper now was more like how a normally sized person might speak at a loud party, but it didn’t appear to bother the little girl. She grinned back at him.
Thirty or more other people waited to get his autograph and meet him, lining every aisle in the store, and more came in behind me. I tried to carefully move through them, saying “excuse me” as I went, but then I gave up and just started pushing and using my elbows a little, too. I had to clock in and start work, even if everyone else did seem bedazzled by this Woodsmen player.
He wasn’t such a big deal, anyway, just really nice and fun to be around, and it didn’t hurt him that he was handsome, too. Maybe not in the way that some model or actor might be in a cologne ad, all soft and pale and long-haired. Sure, Bowie’s hair was long but it surrounded a face that wasn’t soft at all. His features were all large and cut, just like the rest of his body. That big, hard body I’d seen when we went swimming.
“Excuse me!” I said angrily, but it wasn’t the woman making the cell phone video who’d ticked me off so much—I was mad at myself. Why was I having these thoughts? These same thoughts, again?
As I was moving past the deli counter towards the dairy case and the door to the back room, he spotted me. “Lissa,” he called, and I stopped. “Excuse me,” he told everyone, and his words worked better than when I’d said them. Or maybe, they were more afraid of his elbows than of mine. “Hey there,” he said when he got close.
“Hi,” I answered. It felt like it had been a long time since I’d seen him. In the weeks that had followed Fan Day, the Woodsmen had taken their trip to Mackinac Island for meetings and team building, the Wonderwomen locker room had suffered catastrophic flooding from two broken water pipes and was still closed down, classes for my last year of college were set to begin, the bakery was closing soon for the season, Aubin still hadn’t been over to talk to our dad, and I’d been trying not to think of this guy at all.
“Hey there,” he told me again, and then shook his head. “I think I already did the greeting part. Sorry.”
“That’s ok. Sometimes I say weird stuff, too. You must remember my wedding speech,” I prompted when he appeared not to understand.
“I don’t remember that being weird.”
“Really?” I stared disbelievingly at him, and then looked around at the horde of people trying to peer past his big back to see what we were doing in front of the cold cuts. “I have to go clock in and I’m going to have to ask all of these people to leave. The owner of the store, Martha, will get very nervous about them bruising the produce and maybe even stealing from her. They’re not buying anything, either, they’re just clogging up the aisles.”
He nodded. “Ok. Let’s see what I can do.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and his voice boomed out. “Hey y’all, I really appreciate your support but you have to clear out since this is a place of business. Go Woodsmen!”
There were a lot of echoes of that, and although they didn’t seem to want to leave, most of them listened to him and trailed out of the front door. Many faces, however, remained pressed against the front window, and someone was going to have to go out there and wipe off their nose prints. When I punched into the ancient machine in the back room, I also found a roll of paper towel and some glass cleaner.
Bowie and a few actual customers were pushing carts around the store when I came emerged and the owner of the NGS, Martha Engstrom, was at the register. When she got nervous or upset, her head got a little twitch. At the moment, she was about to lose it off her shoulders.
“Sissy!” she hissed to me, and I hurried to take her place as cashier. There were two registers, actually, but only the one functioned. A woman waited to check out but Martha hadn’t seemed to notice the cans neatly unloaded onto the belt. I rang up those but I was distracted, too, first by Martha’s whispered questions about Bowie and why he was shopping in her store for the first time, and second by Bowie himself, who had already filled a cart up to its brim. He pushed that one and pulled a second one along behind, too.
“What’s he doing here? We’ve never had a Woodsmen player in the NGS before, not ever!” Martha said. “Is he really buying all that?”
I had no good answers for her. “I guess so. I’m not sure why he’s here now, but I did tell him not to shop at Art’s Market because of the rodent infestation. I even talked about how they claimed that ‘teenagers’ were scattering bags of chips around the store, but it was actually rats.” Art’s was our local rival, and I knew Martha would be glad to hear my tips to potential customers.
She switched from staring at the Woodsmen player to staring at me. “You know Garrett Bowman well enough to talk to him about where he gets his potato chips?”
“No, not really. I know him some,” I admitted. “He’s very nice.”
“Does he live around here?”
I thought of his apartment, which was about twenty miles away from where we stood. Shopping at Martha’s place was a little out of his way, and he’d had to pass by several big markets and a warehouse store on the road. “He’s not from this town, exactly,” I said. “But he has been to Laurel Lake.”
“How do you know so much about him, Sissy? Are the two of you—”
“No! No, of course not. I’m with Ward.” I was, totally. Since the incident in the restaurant parking lot, he’d been on his absolute best behavior and was acting like the guy I remembered from when I’d first met him in high school. “Look what he gave me,” I told Martha, and lifted the silver chain with the heart pendant from beneath my t-shirt to show her.
She studied the necklace. “Hmph,” she grunted at it. “If I were you, I’d test that metal to make sure it’s real. I wouldn’t want you to get a rash from some junkshop jewelry.”
“It’s silver,” I assured her, and it might have been. Martha just wasn’t a fan of my boyfriend. Once, last summer, he’d come into the store and had gotten pretty angry with me about something—I couldn’t remember what, but I’d done something to annoy him and she’d overheard him saying a few mean things. I had forgiven him, but Martha hadn’t.
She turned her attention back to Bowie and we both watched him peruse the peanut butter and then select three jars. Finally, he and his mountains of groceries came up to the front.
“This will teach me to shop after practice,” he said. “I might be overbuying.”
“I don’t think you have room in your kitchen for all this,” I agreed and Martha gaped at me.
“How do you know that, Sissy Frazier?”
