by R. A. Rock
“You were trying to steal my medicine,” the guy said, still in a loud tone but not yelling anymore. “That’s for my mother. She could die without it.”
“Sorry. Sorry, man,” the thief said, still backing away. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was going to sell it. I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t know it was for your mom. I’ll just go now.”
The other man’s back was heaving from the fight and his anger, I supposed.
Strangely enough their fight hadn’t attracted anyone else’s attention. There wasn’t very much staff on right at the moment and hardly any customers were around this early in the morning.
I noticed the guy rubbing his jaw with one hand and holding the bag with the medicine against his chest to keep it safe.
I moved forward with my cart to see if he was alright. He was still turned away from me but I saw that he had dark brown, slightly messy hair. His coat was stuffed into his shopping cart and the white T-shirt he wore stretched across his wide, muscled back. He was very tall.
“Are you okay?” I said, with mild trepidation. I mean, the guy had just got into a fight in a grocery store. Maybe he had deserved it. While I waited for him to respond, I checked him out. I couldn’t help it. His back and arms looked strong in a rugged sort of way that I liked.
Another heartbeat went by and he still made no answer. Maybe this could be like one of those scenes in the romantic comedies I like to watch. Where the couple meets in a bizarre scene in the grocery store.
I only thought that, though, until he turned around and my stomach did a crazy flip-flop.
Oh no.
Not Matt Brooks.
We stared at each other for a long moment, till I couldn’t stand it anymore. There was no recognition in his ridiculously gorgeous face, which was completely expressionless. He had some dark stubble on his jaw, which was strong and sexy. And those blue eyes of his that were always a surprise because he has brown hair were fixed on me, making my breathing speed up. I shook myself mentally enough to speak to him.
“Are you okay?” I said, not using his name. Maybe he didn’t recognize me. Who was I kidding? Of course, he wouldn’t. Why would he? We hadn’t seen each other since grad, ten years ago. Though he was way more good looking than I remembered, I was sure I definitely looked ten years older.
He appeared sort of stunned and I wondered if the punch had actually given him a concussion or something.
“Maybe you need to go to the hospital?”
“I’m okay,” he said, his deep voice thrumming through me and reminding me of hearing him sing every lunch at choir practise. He was a bass. God, what that voice had done to me back then. “And he didn’t get my mom’s medicine, so that’s alright.”
The idea that the thief had been planning to steal medicine and then sell it to desperate townspeople who might need it disturbed me more than I wanted to admit.
I mean, yeah, the power was out but this wasn’t some post apocalyptic novel, or something. This was real life.
Matt was silent and I supposed our conversation was over. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t recognize me. We had spent a lot of time together as kids, playing. And then we had been in all the same classes in high school. We had been in band and choir together — oh, and we had both played piano, too. Often against each other in competitions.
“Guess I’ll go pay, then.”
I gave him a polite smile, more glad to have avoided an awkward for-old-time’s-sake conversation than disappointed that he didn’t remember me. I shoved my cart down the aisle a little harder than necessary, feeling out of sorts. I hadn’t gone more than a foot past him when he spoke at my back.
“Guess you don’t remember me, eh, Nessa?”
I paused, holding my breath.
“No, it figures that you wouldn’t. But I sure remember you.”
Matt
“Guess you don’t remember me, eh, Nessa?”
I had to say something.
“No, it figures that you wouldn’t,” I muttered almost to myself, my shoulder muscles bunching with tension. “But I sure remember you.”
I couldn’t stand it.
Couldn’t stand to watch her walk away from me again.
Not that I had had any claim on her then. Nor did I now. But I just couldn’t bear to have her look at me as if she didn’t even know who I was. As if I wasn’t worthy of being remembered — even as nothing more than a former classmate and childhood friend.
The sounds of the grocery store swirled around me — the soft beep of the checkouts, the sound of carts rolling down the aisles, and my own harsh breathing from the fight.
Bitterness filled me.
She didn’t remember me.
I had been a fool to come back home.
Then she stopped walking.
She twisted her head around, those chocolate brown eyes seeing deep inside of me in a way that made my pulse kick up a notch. She had this intense gaze that seemed as familiar to me as my own, though she hadn’t looked at me in ten years.
“I remember you, Matt.”
And my heart stuttered.
She turned completely around, then, and I realized that I hadn’t imagined that moment just now when our eyes had met.
God, she looked amazing.
Her brown hair was long and straight, though shorter than it had been in high school when it had hung down to her waist. Her face looked exactly the same. Not a bit older. Her curves were, well curvier from what I could see with her coat unzipped and hanging open.
“What are you doing here? I heard that you moved to BC,” Nessa said, making an attempt at normal conversation.
I forced myself to do the small talk thing because what else was there to do? Tell her I hadn’t forgotten her? Tell her that I thought about her — a lot? Tell her what I told everyone else? That I had moved home so that I could help my mother, who had developed Type 2 diabetes and had recently been put on insulin and wasn’t doing very well. While my real reason was standing right in front of me.
I wanted another chance to not chicken out with her. To give it one last try before I made every attempt to remove her from my mind and heart.
No. I wasn’t going to say that. That was not grocery store conversation.
So, I told her what I had been up to.
“I did move to BC. I trained as a wilderness guide.”
Her eyebrows rose as if she was impressed and I went on.
“Then I guided out there for…” I did the math in my head. “Five years.”
“Why did you come back?” she said, looking mystified as if no one in their right mind would ever move from British Columbia to Manitoba. I supposed if that was what she was thinking, then she did have a point.
“I guess maybe I missed home. Maybe I started to really hate rain,” I shrugged and she smiled, blinding me and nearly stopping my heart. “I’ve been working out at Wintering Lake for a couple years but decided to move back in with my mom. She isn’t doing so well.”
“Wintering Lake?” Her eyebrows rose again. “Americans wanting the Canadian experience? What do you help them kill? Fish? Bear? Moose?”
“I did hunting for the first year but then switched to being a simple fishing guide. It’s a lot less work.”
“I can imagine,” she said, a grimace on her face.
And I knew she could.
She had grown up with a father who had taught her all of that. She used to hate going hunting but more than that, she hated fishing. She hated everything about it. But most of all she hated eating the fish.
But she had learned it all.
I knew because when we were kids she would tell me that she wouldn’t be able to play for a while because they were going into the bush. Her family’s idea of a vacation was her father flying his twin engine plane into a remote lake and them camping for a week, fishing and hunting.
“Still hate fish?” I said, studying her expressive face.
>
Her nose wrinkled up.
“Yes. But I’m a vegetarian now so I’ll never have to eat it ever again.”
I nodded, suddenly feeling that I didn’t know what to say. I grabbed ahold of the stilted conversation’s best prop.
“So, where are you working?”
“Oh, I’m at the high school. I teach grade twelve math.”
“Figures,” I said, not thinking before I spoke. “You always were brilliant in math.”
She got a nostalgic look in those almond-shaped brown eyes.
“Yeah, I guess I was. So were you. I always thought you’d be an engineer.”
“I tried. But I quit university after two years. Couldn’t hack it. I like the outdoors. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now that I’m here, though.”
“Your mom’s sick?” she said, looking concerned.
“Not sick exactly. She has Type 2 Diabetes and because of her medication she’s been dealing with hypoglycaemia — that’s low blood sugar. There’s been quite a few times where she’s gotten confused and twice now she’s passed out and had to be driven to the hospital.”
“Oh no.”
I nodded, feeling grim as I remembered the time the neighbours had called to tell me that my mom was in the hospital in a coma. After that was when I quit my job and decided to move back in with my mom.
“She’s having a hard time managing her blood sugar. And the doctors say that because she’s had so many episodes she’s getting so she can’t even tell when she has low blood sugar, which is even more dangerous. And the neighbours that usually check on her are away right now so I need to get back there…” I trailed off.
Why was I telling her all this? As if she cared.
My mom was almost out of the pills that help her control her blood sugar and she had asked me to stop by the pharmacy. Her diabetes wasn’t life threatening. It was only Type 2. And she needed the pills to regulate her blood sugar. But it was misuse of the damn pills that was causing the hypoglycaemia.
And the hypoglycaemia was getting worse. It seems that she was having low blood sugar episodes but she didn’t know it and at first they weren’t bad. But the first time she had had a severe episode, the neighbours had found her on the floor and they had thought she had had a stroke because of the confusion, slurred speech, and lack of motor control.
That had been scary enough but the last time they had found her was the time she went into a coma on the hour long drive to the hospital from the lake.
If they hadn’t found her, she would have died.
I couldn’t handle that after losing my dad last year.
She had recovered but it scared me that something like that might happen again when I wasn’t there. She hadn’t quite figured out how to balance her food intake, exercise, and pills. So I had moved back in with her until she got it sorted out and I was sure that she had it all under control.
Today, I had only just come into town to get her medicine and do all the errands that needed doing. The plan was to head straight back out to the lake but that had been put on hold for now, while I waited for the hydro to come back on so that I could gas up. I only had about a quarter of a tank.
“I’m so sorry, Matt. I didn’t know that she was having health difficulties. She seemed fine last time I talked to her and I thought maybe something had happened and I hadn’t heard.”
“You talked to my mom?” I said, feeling suddenly mystified and lost in the conversation.
“Yeah, I bought the cabin next to hers. I’m fixing it up.”
“Really?”
I totally loved the idea of her buying a cabin and fixing it up. Especially next to my mom’s.
“Yep.”
“Whoa. Cool. It’s almost like we’ll be neighbours again.”
She smiled at the thought.
And then just like that the conversation came to a complete and utter standstill. Neither of us able to keep up the small talk any longer.
“Well, it was good to see you,” Nessa said, her eyes warming a bit as she spoke the words, so that I almost believed that she had found it good to see me.
“Yeah. Take care. Stay warm.”
She gave a rueful laugh.
“Yeah, I will.”
We went into separate check-outs to pay and I felt really, really strange — empty and bleak. Like that had been my chance and I had missed it. All these years of thinking of her had come down to one stupid conversation and now it was over.
And she was gone from my life.
Probably forever.
Nessa
Well, that was weird.
I carried my reusable bags full of supplies out to my Honda. The cruel spring wind stung my cheeks, made my eyes water, and whipped my hair where it hung out of my tuque — though my ears and head were warm inside the tight fitting, warm, knitted hat.
I thought about my conversation with Matt. Obviously he did remember me. I should have known he would. He was quiet, intelligent, and always thinking. The deep guy that didn’t say much but when he did, people listened.
Funny how he had thought that I had forgotten him. I could never forget him. I had been so madly in love with him in high school that I had done some pretty stupid stuff.
Like once I had made him a present for his birthday and left it on top of his locker. With no name on it to tell that it was me that had done it. And I had written songs and poems about my love for him. Kind of dorky teenage stuff. I had longed for him so much but I had never had the nerve to tell him.
It wasn’t like one of those movies where I was the nerdy girl and he was the super popular guy who wouldn’t look at me. It was more like I was the ordinary girl and he was the really intelligent guy, who was cool in an I-don’t-need-you-to-like-me sort of way.
He was insanely talented musically. And somehow he managed to make that cool, too. He played piano and tenor sax in band and sang in the choir, but he also taught himself to play the guitar and that gave him instant status because he would wear his guitar on his back at school or he would have it with him when our group of friends would hang out at someone’s house.
He would always be pulling it out and playing in the forum — a sunken circle area with wide carpeted steps leading down into it — which was the hang out spot in the high school. Students gathered there to talk while we were between classes on break. Matt could almost always be seen there with his guitar, playing quietly while listening to the conversations.
He had never shown an ounce of interest in me in anything other than an aquaintance/classmate way. He was always polite. Talked to me when we had something to discuss, like an assignment for math class, or a song we were singing in choir. He was always friendly.
But that was not what I had wanted at all. He had had no interest in me as a girlfriend and he was all I could think about in grade twelve — our last year of high school.
I sighed as I loaded the groceries into the trunk of my car and locked it. Then I drove across the street and parked at the other mall. Taking another handful of reusable bags, I headed into the Canadian Tire to get the rest of my supplies.
Seeing Matt had made me feel melancholy. Our short encounter had stirred feelings in me that I thought I had forgotten.
And what right did he have to look so goddamned hot?
The last time I had seen him he had been a boy, cute but gangly. And he had asked me to dance — a pity dance, no doubt — to the song Power of Love by Celine Dion, for goodness sake. At graduation he had been tall and lanky — all arms and legs.
Now? Oh my God. He was tall but his chest had broadened and his arms were hardened with real work. Those were no gym muscles but had been earned doing real things in the real world. And it turned me on to think of it. He was clearly in good shape and I wondered if he had a six pack under that T-shirt. Something told me he did. His jaw had become chiseled and he had a dusting of stubble that only made him look more rugged.
Those bright blue eyes, so startling in someone with such dark bro
wn hair, had taken my breath away. Jesus, he had probably forgotten our encounter already and it was going to be weeks before I could get him out of my head again — if I ever could.
I pushed through the turnstile and went into the store, which was somehow dimly lit and a bit dingy. The tiles never seemed quite clean. And the narrow aisles had very tall shelves that loomed over me when I walked them.
Canadian Tire is a bit of a national icon. It was a sporting goods store, where you could also buy camping supplies, household goods, and stuff like lighting fixtures and screws. A lot of the men I knew, my father and brother included would go to Canadian Tire, just to see what was there, the way some women go into their favourite clothing store to see if there’s anything new.
And the Canadian Tire flyer! Every week it came out and there was such muted excitement at its arrival. It was always kept on the kitchen table for days so that it could be properly perused at everyone’s leisure and all the deals noted and the appropriate purchases made.
I grabbed one of the tiny carts they have — so they’ll fit down the narrow aisles, I guessed — and headed straight for the camping section. As quickly as I could, I loaded up on matches, candles, and water purification tablets (I cleaned them out of all three). I also picked up two wool blankets, and a couple insulating blankets that looked like large pieces of tinfoil.
Then I thought hard.
I probably wouldn’t be coming back and I didn’t want to forget anything. Was there anything else I needed? It also occurred to me that if things got bad, people would be in here fighting each other. I thought of how that guy had punched Matt in the store already today and the power had only been out for twenty-four hours. No, I definitely wouldn’t be coming back for awhile.
I walked up and down the aisles, tossing things into my cart as I went. I wasn’t sure why I was getting all this stuff but the apprehensive feeling urged me to stock up… and I listened.
Soon I was home and I locked all my doors up tight, piling on the clothes since the temperature outside was hovering around 0 degrees Celcius and it was bitterly cold in the house.
I made myself a salad with the last of my vegetables and ate it shivering in the quiet house. Then I piled all the blankets I could find — quilts, comforters, you name it — onto my bed, burrowed in, still in all my layers and took a nap.