by Nina Post
“Something interesting?” the morning shift cook asked.
Sammy picked it up and skimmed the article. “Somethin’ about Snackerge.” He breathed loudly through his nose as he read. “Ah, now that’s too bad. I didn’t know that.”
“Know what?” The cook laid bacon flat on the grill, where it sizzled.
“Kid’s had a rough go of it,” Sammy said. “I just took him at face value as the most naturally gifted short-order cook I ever seen.”
“Hey!” the cook said.
“What?” Sammy scratched his beard growth with his knuckles. “Take it like a man and learn from it. He’s a maestro, especially in a team. He’s damn fast. His plating is top-notch; I see the disappointment in my customers’ faces when they get a plate done by anyone else. They can tell. And he’s real creative when we’re out of somethin’, when we have too much of somethin’. He has the nose of a rat and the taste buds of a catfish.”
“I’ll let him have that dubious distinction,” the cook said.
“And he’s looked at contracts for me, caught some things I never would’ve noticed. Saved me from a nightmare lease.”
“Good for him,” the cook said with some sarcasm.
“I don’t know about that,” Sammy said, and looked down through his reading glasses to read out loud from the article: “Unable to obtain work in legal support following the scandal, especially after a year he couldn’t account for, Eric returned to Jamesville one day and found jobs at The Buckhead as a shot boy, and at Sammy’s Diner & Indoor Shooting Range as a short-order cook.”
The cook blew a raspberry and got more eggs from a carton.
“The best short-order cook,” Sammy mumbled. He took off his glasses, which dangled from a chain on his barrel chest. “It’s too bad, what happened to Eric.”
“What happened to him?” the cook said.
“No idea, but getting fired over some scandal, that didn’t help.”
FROZEN PIZZA DELIVERY TRUCK ON LINGONBERRY STREET
Eric paid $35 for the used freezer, and the lanky seller with muscular calves helped him put it in the bus.
“What do you have in mind for it?” the seller asked, probably checking to make sure that the answer wasn’t something he would need to report to the police, or worse, get in on that action. He treated Eric as an unstable element until proven otherwise.
“I need a place to store my yogurt,” Eric said.
A grin spread across the seller’s angular face and he pointed from the hip like he was drawing a gun. “You’re Taffy’s Dad?”
“Well, yeah. How did you know?”
“I teach phys-ed, when I’m not selling frozen pizzas.”
“Oh? How’s Taffy doing in phys-ed?”
“She’s like a monkey with the ropes, but not so keen on the group thing. Demon at soccer, but I can’t get her to join the team. Born maverick.”
“How did you know she was my daughter?” Eric knew it couldn’t have been the ‘born maverick’ part.
“The article.”
“What article?” Eric said.
The seller held up a finger. “I think I still have it on the counter. Hold on a sec.”
The seller returned and gave the paper to Eric. “Keep it. Already did the Jumble.”
Eric returned to the Princess, sat in behind the wheel, and read the article.
What lies in store for Jamesville’s disappearing act Eric Snackerge? Will he be in his sixties, still wearing his work uniform of suede short-shorts, laced vest and antlers, getting pinched on the butt by eighty-year-old ladies, working a late-night shift at Sammy’s, pushing a plate of pancakes and eggs out of a short-order slot? Watching TV alone in his bus, playing that old record of mistakes in his head, wishing he could have done things differently but being powerless to change them? Wishing his wife and daughter would occasionally remember his existence?
Eric lowered the paper. His blood had turned cold. He sat there so long that the seller was startled to see him when he took his garbage to the curb.
Chapter Eight
“DZ.”
“DZ?”
“DZ!”
“What!”
Nathan resorted to jumping up and down in front of the Galaxy Force cabinet until DZ turned off the machine.
“What is your panic?” DZ said.
“You have to read this now,” Nathan said, holding out the Jamesville Tribune.
“Read it to me.”
“You’re joking.”
“Just read it to me, will you? Is that too much to ask?”
“You do know how to read, don’t you?”
DZ refused to take the paper, so while DZ pretended he was still controlling the game, Nathan read out loud from the article: “‘I saw Eric Snackerge buying cartloads of Quantal Organic Yogurt, which currently has an Amass-and-Win contest on their foil lids. Though nothing in his recent background after his disappearance suggests that he is capable of achievement beyond showing up to work on time in a consistent manner, Eric intends to win this contest. I had to ask myself why this was so important to him. Perhaps he wants to assuage his burden of failure and lost potential. Perhaps he believes that winning the grand prize will somehow make everything okay again. Only Eric Snackerge knows, but he won’t stop until he wins that contest, or gets darn close.’“
DZ maneuvered his tall body out of the cabinet. “Crap.” He strode to his workstation, typed quickly, and brought up a new program.
“What’s that?” Nathan asked.
“Nanosensor controls. We’re using so-called smart packaging for this brand, and the nanosensors monitor and report from the food,” DZ said, popping a candy in his mouth.
“Really? From the pudding?”
DZ went pale and glared at Nathan. “It’s not pudding, it’s yogurt. Yogurt!”
“Sorry, my mistake.” Nathan put up his palms to appease.
“Don’t call it pudding.”
“Understood.”
DZ took in a deep, shuddering breath and pressed his eyes shut. A few seconds later, he snapped into action again on the keyboard. “We designed the contest to be unwinnable, but I don’t want to take any chances. I’m activating the hyper-directional sound so the next time this Snackerge joker gets within a few feet of any of the deployed containers, he’ll receive a nearly subconscious message,” he typed again, “telling him to give up pursuing,” he typed some more, “this contest.” DZ stood upright and cracked his back. “It should drive him mad. Maybe he’ll check himself into a private hospital for treatment. Ha, maybe he should do that anyway.”
DZ moved to the kitchen and made himself several tiny cake doughnuts with the small donut machine that resembled his panini maker. “I need info on the family,” he told Nathan through a mouthful of cake. “Wife, kids, relatives, in-laws, friends, coworkers, pets. I want to know where they live; what they do, and how much they make; where they go to school and what their grades are; where they shop for food and how long it takes for them to get to their preferred store; what store discount cards they use.” He wiped the back of a hand across his forehead. “What products they use, everything from chewing gum to fiber substitute to lubricant. Bankruptcy, divorce, mortgages, liens, titles, how they vote, what church they attend, what they read. Anything and everything.”
Nathan didn’t move.
DZ swallowed a piece of donut. “Why aren’t you writing that down?”
“Because I’m not going to do that,” Nathan said.
“Why not?”
“(A), I don’t want to and (B), I’m busy doing stuff that keeps us operational. Get your flunkies the enchanters to do it.”
DZ made a jazz-hands gesture. “Fine, I’ll do it myself if you’re going to be such a diva about it. The enchanters may know how to imbue spirits into a food product, but they couldn’t find their own asses with a flashlight and a GPS.” He stalked off to his office and slammed the door.
Nathan wondered if being diligent about accounting and keeping on
top of vendor contracts could possibly be considered diva-ish behavior. He settled on ‘No.’
Ed Fellier, regional legend in the HVAC field, had been dead almost exactly one year. He had enjoyed bird-watching, woodworking in the garage, painting in watercolors, and square dancing, in roughly that order. But most of all, he enjoyed raising his daughter, Willa. He had named her after the great engineer Willis Haviland Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning, and brought her up to continue the Fellier legacy. She had not disappointed him. When he died, Ed left Willa a tidy, painstakingly maintained two-story house with original nineteenth -century woodwork, plank floors, stained glass, and fireplace; some family he had never much liked; and the challenge of carrying forth the Fellier HVAC legacy.
Despite a house full of unpacked boxes, Willa was focused on one thing: ripping her husband a new one. She met him at the front door.
“What do I hate?” she said, standing between the Rhododendron bush and a broom, hands on her hips.
Without hesitating, Eric ticked off a list on his hands. “Non-air conditioned places, especially the outside. Camping. Long-winded conversations and conversational niceties. People who can’t be direct. Laugh tracks. Staying overnight at other people’s houses, especially when you can’t control the thermostat.”
She jiggled a heel in impatience. He hadn’t hit it yet, so he just had to keep going. “Slow walkers. Overly religious day planner inserts. Fried things. Going to the grocery store –”
Willa put out her hand to halt him there. “And what have I sworn to never do again?”
“Go the grocery store,” Eric said without hesitation.
“So why are you doing this to me?”
“I’m doing this for Taffy! If I can get this for her, maybe – maybe you and Taffy will – maybe we’ll be together again. What else can I do?”
Willa looked baffled. “You think having my grocery delivery stopped will bring our family together? How, by forcing us all to shop for groceries together?”
Eric didn’t say anything for several seconds. “Wait, what does your grocery delivery have to do with the contest?”
Willa put her hands to her temples, elbows akimbo. “What contest? The one from the paper?”
“The contest I’m going to win for Taffy so she’ll stop disliking me intensely.”
“Taffy doesn’t – look, here’s the thing,” Willa said. “I can’t get groceries delivered because all of a sudden, Dad’s house is outside the delivery area, even though he’s had groceries delivered from the same company for years. I thought that you had it stopped out of spite. Over the house, and, other stuff.”
Eric laughed and Willa’s eyes flashed a warning. “I couldn’t stop our grocery delivery even if I wanted to, which of course I don’t.”
She exhaled and nodded. “I shouldn’t have thought you were responsible. That was petty of me.”
“I hate to say it, but you were giving me a little too much credit,” Eric said. “It’s probably just a mix-up on their side. Software upgrade or something. I’ll call for you.”
Willa smiled, and Eric felt a flash of a good mood, the warming rays of the sun through the clouds on a freezing day.
“At least I didn’t have to make Taffy’s lunch this morning,” Willa said. “She asked for money to buy it at school, said she likes it better there.”
“They must have pizza on the menu every day,” Eric said, feeling hopeful and anxious because they were having a normal conversation.
“I should go back inside.” Willa rubbed her arms and shoulders. “Let me know about the delivery situation. I’d feel bad about sending Taffy to the store every week to do all the grocery shopping.”
Eric shivered and hurried back to the Princess. He wanted to get back to buying the yogurt. It was the only thing keeping him from curling up into a fetal position in his bus. But he took some time first to make a few calls, including one to Sammy, who had some liability issues. He arranged a small advance from Sammy in exchange for more free legal work – the kind that didn’t require a licensed attorney. He also placed a call to Holt’s, and promised to make a few free home deliveries of tools and pastries in exchange for a favor. Finally, he called his friend Jimmy, who worked at Argosy Foods, which had a nice wine section.
After unloading another haul of yogurt on the floor of the Princess, Eric opened his big white freezer to start transferring.
The freezer was empty.
He opened the smaller freezer, then the mini fridge. Both empty.
“REX!”
The spirit looked over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “I’m trying to read.”
“My lids are gone.” Eric was perfectly still.
“Is that street slang?”
“They’re gone. They were here, and now they’re not.”
“Maybe Taffy borrowed them to make an alien communication device.”
Eric tilted his head.
“You’re actually considering that, aren’t you?” Rex phased out then phased back in, incredulous.
“I wouldn’t put it past her.” Eric waved his hand back and forth. “And stop doing … that.” He sat down on the small sofa across from the smaller freezer. The only explanation was that one of those other people who wanted the yogurt broke into the Princess. He would have to take extra precautions against his competitors in the Amass-and-Win contest.
He opened a small locked safe and took out his laptop. “I need a bigger safe,” Eric said.
“Duh,” Rex said.
“And I need to start keeping just the tops. I’ll transfer the yogurt to plastic containers or baggies so I can keep eating it. It seems so obvious now.”
“In your defense,” Rex pointed out, “why would you ever think that your yogurt collection would be stolen out of your preposterous bus?”
Eric sat with the laptop on the sofa. “Because there’s a horde of ravenous yogurt-zombies single-mindedly pursuing the same prize?”
Rex came closer and sat on the freezer across from Eric. “You’re sure they’re after the prize?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Eric said.
Eric hadn’t had much luck getting the grocery delivery problem fixed. He took Taffy to Quantity Market to get the week’s groceries, not for the first time, because Willa’d be damned if she was going to do it. And Eric was fine with that. His wife’s intense and abiding hatred for going anywhere near, let alone into, a grocery store, was to be respected.
Taffy gave Eric a list and kept another for herself. Taffy would say that her grocery list was a marvel of strategy and logistics, resulting in an equal marvel of tactics and efficiency. But Eric never understood her strategy, which he found bewilderingly nonlinear.
Eric didn’t want to disappoint Taffy. Little things added up, until one day, Taffy would be calling his back-stabbing ex-friend Mark Bollworm “Dad” and forgetting Eric’s birthday and why Eric was around and how she was even related to him. And his ex-friend – he couldn’t even say his name inside his head – would replace him in the family with ease.
Starting at the produce section near the front, Taffy’s plan was that they would split, visit the aisles on their respective lists in a specific order, then meet at the checkout when they were done. Eric looked at the list again. Between the seemingly random order of items and three annotated diagrams, her list was anything but simple. After they split, Eric tried to cross paths with Taffy as much as possible. When she got frozen vegetables, he got frozen breakfast, but he had to make sure that he wasn’t violating the list, and that it was reasonable or at least not inexplicable that he was in the same aisle. Mentally, it was exhausting.
“So, how’s school?” Eric said, talking fast, but removing frozen waffles from the freezer display slowly, like they were corroded sticks of dynamite.
Taffy unloaded box after box of frozen spinach from the cabinet into the cart like a professional discus athlete. “Tolerable at moments, but unpleasant overall.”
“Any more trou
ble with Miss Farman?” Miss Farman was Taffy’s homeroom teacher, and Willa had to intervene when Taffy refused to participate in a reading program out of principle and out of her scorn of the works on the list. Willa knew how much Taffy disliked being, as Taffy phrased it, ‘dragooned into diktats.’ After a battle of wills, Willa and Miss Farman reached a compromise that allowed Taffy to customize her own program.
Taffy moved onto the broccoli, and tossed the bags into the cart. Eric thought of a fishmonger this time, because the bags were bigger. “There’s always trouble, Dad. Miss Farman doesn’t have a brain in terms of an organ. She has nerve nets running through her body and a surface that’s both mouth and anus. When she goes to the faculty lounge between classes, it’s like a bacterium joining other bacteria to form a biofilm.”
Taffy took a running start and rode the back of the cart down her aisle, a tiny, blonde, fluorescent-orange-high-top-wearing soapbox racer. Eric could hardly stand it. He loved her so much he half-expected to shatter.
Eric grabbed a few more things from the list, then managed to intercept his daughter again in the cereal aisle, where she was stretching up to get boxes of her favorite cereal, Original Zombits, then again for her second favorite, Honey Crunch Golems.
“So, Miss Farman’s still giving you a hard time?” Eric said, ready to storm into her teacher’s office the next school day.
Taffy hopped, her fingers straining. Eric wanted to help her, but knew from experience that she hated that and would just swat him away. Eventually, she knocked one box of Honey Crunch Golems over and caught it before it dropped.
“Her lessons are dogmatic and superannuated.” With that said, Taffy was off again, this time pushing off in a crouch, arms straight out, cart barreling forward without sight or mercy. A woman in her twenties jumped out of the way, and Eric nearly crossed himself with gratitude that the only other person in the aisle was quick and fit.
Eric’s next task was pudding and plastic wrap. He got the plastic wrap, then picked up a multi-pack of butterscotch pudding. He considered it, then put it back. Then he picked up another multi-pack, a custard-flavored pudding.