The Woman in Mike’s

Lately I’ve been going to the grocery store at odd hours, right when it opens at seven or just before closing. I’m not talking about a supermarket—just a small town grocery store, Mike’s Market, sandwiched between the library on one side and an old house converted to therapists’ offices on the other. In the mornings, the pallets of cartons in the aisles have a staged quality like an installation by Andy Warhol. In the early evenings commuters clatter in to pick up a pound of hamburger, a bag of baby salad greens, and a gallon of Rocky Road. The lowering sun floods through the big front windows, through which you can see the small town plaza, its memorial clock inscribed with the names of our town’s prominent families. The name I grew up with is third from the top: Avery, glinting gold.

I used to wander into Mike’s whenever it was convenient, Hollis balanced on my hip as I one-handed the cart past the pale bagged lettuces and the shiny reptilian skins of avocados. Hollis, fourteen months old, is the child of my middle age. A placid baby, her gray eyes take in everything as she grips my sleeve with cool, possessive fingers. Not like the others, who had eyes only for the candy displays.

Today I needed milk for my tea. The half gallon in the fridge had spoiled—one of the children must have left it out too long—and I had to pick up the cat from the vet anyway, and there was a space out front. So I chanced it.

“Petra, how are you!”

No way to pretend I hadn’t heard. I looked up—flushing, hip canted, Hollis heavy and hot against me—into a thin pale freckled face framed by flyaway gray-orange hair. She looked so pleased to see me. She always did. “Hello!” I said.

“Petra. I was hoping to run into you. I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I’ve decided you were right. I didn’t think so at first, I admit, but after a while … Well, I saw things differently. I wanted to let you know I’ve decided to take your advice.” She was smiling, but it was a strained smile, and her bright blue eyes looked anxious. She had thin lips, thin, almost translucent teeth that looked as though they might break on a hard crust.

“Oh,” I said. I bounced Hollis on my hip in that comforting motion of mothers everywhere, though she was unperturbed. She was looking hard at the woman—I wish I had something better to call her—and the woman looked back at Hollis and half held out her hand—warily, as though to a strange dog.

“Such a good baby,” she said.

I had a speech on this subject, how there weren’t good babies or bad babies, although some might be noisier than others, or deeper sleepers; but the truth was, since Hollis I no longer believed that speech. “Yes,” I said, allowing myself to admire my fat pink youngest, my Buddha child, whom I had named for the great-grandmother who’d been a suffragette in London and gone to prison, and, on another occasion, lunched with Virginia Woolf.

Hollis gazed at the woman with her gray pitiless eyes.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning for the compliment about, or perhaps to, the baby. As for the advice she claimed I’d given her, I didn’t know what to say. This was not the first time she had alluded to it, and it seemed far too late to ask what it had been. “How did it work out?” I asked.

She was wearing a cotton dress, yellow and white, hanging loosely from her skinny shoulders to her knobby knees, below which copper-green veins showed in her thin bird legs. She wore a necklace of shells strung on a string, like something a child would make. Did she have children? Grandchildren? Doting nieces and nephews, or grandnephews? Not that she was so much older than I was, probably...