Chapter 7

Shawanda Cantwell sat in the parking lot of the Safeway on El Camino Real and kept her hands in her lap.

This was harder than it sounded.

Étain had been inside for eleven minutes. Shawanda knew this because she’d checked her phone twice and was actively resisting checking it a third time. The cart’s retrieval area was visible from where she’d parked. The automatic doors opened and closed for other people. Not her daughter.

She’d written the list herself the night before, organized by aisle the way she always organized it, and then she’d sat at the kitchen table and looked at it for a long moment before sliding it across to Étain.

“You know this store,” she’d said. “You know what we eat. I’ll be in the car.”

Étain had looked at the list. Then at her mother. Something had moved across her face that Shawanda recognized now — the rapid internal calculation, the assessment of whether this was something she could survive, the reaching for a reason to say she couldn’t.

And then she’d taken the list.

Shawanda pressed her hands flat against her thighs and looked at the automatic doors and did not check her phone.

Inside, Étain moved through the produce section with the list held in both hands.

She knew this store. That part was true. She’d been coming here her whole life, trailing her mother’s cart, reaching for things when asked. She knew the layout the way you know a place you’ve always been a passenger in. The produce was on the left when you came through the doors. Dairy was at the back. The cereal aisle was four in from the right.

What she’d never done was move through it making decisions.

The bananas were straightforward. She chose a bunch that was yellow with slight green at the tips — the way her mother always chose them — and put them in the cart without pausing. Apples next. Fuji, the list said, and there they were, and she bagged six of them and kept moving.

She made it through produce and bread and the canned goods aisle before she stopped.

Pasta sauce.

There was an entire section of it. Fourteen feet of jars in varying sizes, brands, varieties. Her mother always bought the same one — a specific brand in a specific variety — but Shawanda hadn’t written the brand on the list. Just pasta sauce. And now Étain stood in front of fourteen feet of options and felt the familiar pressure building behind her sternum, the sense that the wrong choice would have consequences she couldn’t fully calculate, the pull toward her phone to call her mother and ask.