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The automatic doors slid open with a cheerful little sigh, and Deacon Hollow walked through them like a man attending his own sentencing. Behind him came the other three — Chase drifting in with his hands in his hoodie pocket, already scanning the overhead signs like he was deciphering ancient runes; Buddy shouldering through the entryway with the expression of someone who found the concept of a Walmart personally offensive; and Prunella, who ran directly to the cart corral, climbed halfway up the side of it, and had to be physically extracted by the collar.
"We need maybe six things," Deacon announced to no one in particular, pulling out his phone to check the list. "This should take twenty minutes, maximum."
"There's a fashion section," Chase observed.
"Twenty minutes."
"Deacon, they have a fashion section."
"Chase, I know what you're—"
"I'm just saying it's there."
Deacon pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. This was going to take forty-five minutes, minimum. He could feel it in his skeleton.
"Cart," he decided, turning back to the corral. "Everyone stays together. We get the list. We leave."
Prunella had already claimed a cart for herself and was sitting inside the basket with her arms folded, staring up at him with the flat, expectant look of a very small toll collector.
"Out," Deacon told her.
"I want to be pushed."
"You're eight, not two."
"Age is a construct."
"Out, Prunella."
She climbed out with the dramatic slowness of someone twice her age and four times her grievances. Deacon grabbed the cart, took one breath, and pushed off toward the grocery section.
— — —
They made it approximately forty feet before the first incident.
The cart basket connected with the back of Deacon's left knee with a crisp, solid clonk.
He stopped walking. He did not turn around immediately. He stared ahead at a display of chips and practiced the particular breathing technique he'd developed over the last several months of his life.
"Sorry," Buddy offered, from directly behind him. "Brakes are weird on these things."
"Mm."
They kept walking.
Twenty seconds later: clonk.
Deacon's eye twitched.
"Buddy."
"It keeps drifting," Buddy reported, in the completely neutral voice of a man who had never experienced an emotion. "I think the wheel's bad."
Chase, walking alongside them, had his mouth pressed into a very thin line. His shoulders were doing something suspicious.
"Is something funny to you," Deacon asked him.
"No," Chase managed, in a voice approximately two octaves higher than usual.
"Right."
Clonk.
"I SWEAR TO—"
— — —
They found the gluten-free aisle through a process of elimination, two wrong turns, and Chase flagging down a bored-looking teenager in a blue vest who pointed them toward the back corner of the store with the weary resignation of someone who gave this direction eight times a shift.
The section was modest. Chase stood before it with the focused intensity of a scholar examining a primary source.
"This is maybe twelve feet of shelf space," he observed.
"We need pasta and crackers," Deacon reminded him, consulting the list. "That's it. Pasta. Crackers. Done."
"They have three kinds of crackers."
"Great, pick one."
Chase picked up the first box. Read the back. Put it down. Picked up the second box. Read the back with his brow furrowed. Rotated it to read the side panel.
"Chase."
"I'm looking."
"You're reading."
"It's called being an informed consumer, Deacon."
Buddy, from two feet away, was examining a bag of rice flour with the expression of someone who had found a strange artifact from a dead civilization. He turned it over. Shook it once. Put it back.
"Do you actually need to eat?" he asked Chase.
"Yes? I'm a person? I have a body?"
"Seems like a lot of upkeep. Very… expensive upkeep."
"Buddy, that's — you know what, never mind." Chase set the second cracker box down and picked up the third. "This one," he decided. "And the brown rice pasta. The rotini."
"Thank you," Deacon breathed. "Thank you, genuinely, from the bottom of—"
"Oh, also, I want to check if they have the good breadcrumbs while we're back here."
Deacon closed his eyes.
— — —
Prunella disappeared somewhere between dairy and cleaning supplies.
This was not, technically, anyone's fault. This was simply a thing that happened, the same way weather happened — inexplicably and at the worst possible time.
Deacon noticed the absence about ten seconds after it occurred, turned around, and found only Chase holding the cart (Buddy had drifted toward the cleaning supplies and was examining a mop with focused professional skepticism) and a small, Prunella-shaped hole in the space where a small child had recently been standing.
"Where," Deacon started.
"She was just here," Chase offered.
"Where did she go?"
"She was literally right — I looked away for four seconds—"
"Four seconds, Chase, she's eight, you can't look away for—" Deacon stopped himself. Breathed. Looked down the nearest aisle with the haunted eyes of a man who had done this before and would, statistically, do it again. "Okay. Okay. She can't have gone far. She's eight. She has short legs."
"She has very fast short legs," Chase said, which was unhelpful but accurate.
Buddy reappeared from the cleaning supplies aisle holding nothing, which meant he'd found nothing interesting enough to investigate further, which was somehow more unsettling. He looked between Deacon and Chase. Looked at the cart. Looked at the space where Prunella was not.
"Lost the kid?" he asked.
"We didn't lose her," Deacon said.
Buddy's expression communicated, wordlessly and at length, that this was an interesting distinction.
They found her in the toy aisle, three sections over, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a display of craft kits with the settled, patient energy of someone who had been there for years and intended to stay for several more. She had opened nothing. She was simply looking, with the deeply serious expression she reserved for things she wanted and intended to receive eventually through campaign rather than confrontation.
"Prunella," Deacon said.
She turned her head with the unhurried grace of a small empress.
"They have the embroidery kit I wanted," she told him.
"We're not here for embroidery kits."
"I know." She looked back at it. "I'm just looking."
"You disappeared. I thought you were—I didn't know where—" Deacon stopped, reorganized himself. "You can't just wander off."
"I didn't wander. I had a destination."
"That is not—" He took a breath. Let it out. His voice, when it returned, had the carefully neutral quality of someone reading a safety briefing. "Please stay with the group."
Prunella stood up, brushed off her shorts, and fell into step beside him. Then, after exactly three seconds:
"The kit was twelve dollars."
"No."
"It comes with a hoop."
"No."
— — —
By the time they reached the checkout line, Deacon had aged approximately four years.
He stood behind the cart with the list on his phone, checking items off with the methodical precision of a man reassuring himself that the mission had, technically, been accomplished. Pasta: yes. Crackers: yes. The cleaning stuff: yes. The thing for Grandpa Ralph: yes. The thing that had been added to the list at the last second by Chase while Deacon wasn't looking — a bottle of that specific honey that was apparently the only acceptable honey — fine, yes, it was on the belt.
Chase was loading items onto the conveyor with one hand and scrolling through his phone with the other, which should have been physically impossible but apparently wasn't.
Buddy stood with his arms crossed, surveying the candy rack beside the register with an expression of deep disdain, as though the gummy bears had done something personal to him.
Prunella was leaning on the cart handle, staring at the tabloid magazine display with the attentive silence of someone filing information away for later use.
"Man Survives Forty Days On Mountain," she read aloud, pointing.
"Mm," Chase replied.
"Do you think he ate his shoes?"
"Probably not."
"I would eat my shoes."
"Your shoes are velcro."
Prunella considered this. "I would eat them anyway."
The cart handle connected with the back of Deacon's knee.
He turned around very slowly. Buddy met his gaze with an expression of pure, serene innocence — the expression of a man who had been standing completely still and whose hands had definitely not just been on a cart.
The checkout line moved one person forward.
Clonk.
"BUDDY—"
"There's a wobble," Buddy reported calmly. "In the wheel. I've mentioned this."
The cashier, a woman of maybe fifty-five with the settled exhaustion of someone who had processed ten thousand families before this one, glanced up from the register and then back down at the belt. She'd seen enough. She asked for no explanation. She simply began scanning items with the quiet efficiency of someone who had made peace with the world.
Chase, catching Deacon's expression, pressed his mouth together again. His shoulders did the thing.
"Don't," Deacon warned him.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're laughing."
"I have literally not made a sound."
"You're internally laughing, I can tell by your face—"
"I don't control my face."
"That is genuinely the most concerning thing you've ever—"
"Forty-seven eighty," the cashier announced pleasantly, without looking up.
Silence fell over the group. Deacon looked at Chase. Chase looked at Buddy. Buddy looked at the ceiling. Prunella climbed onto the little ledge at the bottom of the cart and balanced there with her arms out, watching them with bright, curious eyes.
Deacon paid.
He paid, and picked up the bags, and shepherded all three of them toward the exit doors with the bone-deep weariness of a man who loved the people in his care and would absolutely, without question, be doing this again in two weeks.
The automatic doors sighed open.
Outside, the parking lot baked in the afternoon sun. Chase walked ahead, bags swinging, apparently already recovered from whatever private amusement he'd been nursing. Buddy trailed a few steps behind him, hands in his pockets, occasionally close enough to Chase that it wasn't quite coincidental.
Prunella walked beside Deacon.
After a moment, she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow, the way she sometimes did without acknowledging that she was doing it.
Deacon looked down at her.
She looked straight ahead, expression serene. Utterly unbothered. An eight-year-old who had gotten exactly what she'd come for, which was, apparently, this.
He sighed through his nose.
He didn't shake her off.
"Next time," he told her, "you stay where I can see you."
"Okay," Prunella agreed, in the easy voice of someone who intended absolutely nothing by it.
Behind them, from the direction of the car, Chase shouted: "Buddy, that was my shin — that was a shin, not a knee—"
"The pavement is uneven," Buddy replied.
"You AIMED—"
Deacon kept walking.
Twenty minutes, he'd told himself.
It had been fifty-three.
He was going to need to lie down.