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It was hard to pull the grocery list out of his pocket with fingers that were burning from the cold. Eventually he managed, squinting again at the list written out in Barb's impossibly small and loopy handwriting. Treena already knew to use that to her advantage, the word COOKIES scrawled along the bottom in her large, clumsy six-year-old print. She wanted cookies so badly that the last three letters made a sharp ninety degree angle to carry on up the side of the page, and if all that failed to convince her father that cookies were the way to go, she even coloured the OO's to look like chocolate chip. Smiling to himself, he took the innocent double-entendre as assurance that Treena was destined to be a Shakespeare or a DaVinci.
He set two boxes of chocolate chip cookies on the counter followed by eggs, milk, bread (whole grain only), flour, apples, broccoli and vegetable oil. The items were flanked by dainty emphatic bullets and underlined emphases like she didn't expect him to understand. He understood her attempt to cleanse and purge herself of the lingering filth that was her marriage. She kept her body full of the pure, low-caloric goods that he bought, and she did it to remind him that he wouldn't be filling her anymore.
* * *
Parking was never free downtown through the week. He had the the luxury of a cruiser for so long, he'd forgotten what it was like to not be able to park wherever he wanted. It didn't take him long to remember, though, especially in the dead of winter when it was dark by five, plummeting to somewhere bellow minus-twenty and he had to walk twenty minutes to reach the car. With no gloves, the plastic bags dug painfully into cold fingers. Wind kicked the snow up off the sides of the street and he lowered his head to lessen the sting of the onslaught, but his head jerked up and around at the sound of something other than the howling of the weather.
"Simon*!"
The hand that wasn't holding shopping bags moved instinctively to his pocket even though he knew that all his money had been left with the clerk at the grocery store. He righted himself, looking ahead, trying to think of his daughter's beautifully untidy hand-writing but all he could think of was fucking milk and whole grains--all for Barb, the selfish bitch. Who was she to use his dwindling earnings on her fill?
"Simon--"
"I don't have any money." He was terse, cold, barely glancing back at the man trying to keep out of the wind. Despite the fact that it was dark, he was wearing sunglasses. Jim was secretly thankful for it. It was always harder to walk away when he didn't.
"You... can put it on your tab," he said after a few moments of hesitation. During those moments Jim had taken a few more steps away, but this time he stopped entirely. Unsure if it was meant to be a joke, he made a face somewhere between a smile and a grimace.
"You don't have a tab," he said finally.
"I could."
The eggs and milk had to be refrigerated, he thought, then hated himself for thinking it. Barb was so determined to make the remainder of his time with her a living hell, because she knew that he would take it. He would lie down and let her walk over his back because he was a good husband. Was. One grocery bag contained cookies and milk. The other conveniently contained the rest of his purchases, and the bag of flour was under his arm. He left the sidewalk, starting down the alley and only stopped long enough to toss her bag and flour into one of the bins.
"What was that?" Smokey eyed the bin with a chagrined look but Jim shook his head quickly, placing a hand on his back to lead him towards the run-down apartments at the back of the street. "Groceries?"
"No," he muttered. He placed a hand on the other's back to lead him inside, his skin too cold even under his own numb hands. "If they were groceries I would have given them to you."
"Thank you!" Even through sunglasses he could see the surprise. "You don't have to do that."
"I don't have to pay you anymore either, apparently," he added with a faint smile.