I also talked her into giving up her yearly support payment to Computer Raiders, which felt disloyal to Charlie, but if something came up, she had my number. I didn’t charge, but that didn’t mean she could afford a trip around the world.

But for Gert and her fixed income, one thing loosening up for her meant a lot.

Another reason for my presence at the grocery store and our eventual trip to some family restaurant chain.

We’d have our usual discussion about it, but I’d be the one paying for both, and Gert would be all about the gratitude in order to hide her relief that she could pay her winter gas bill and maybe afford a haircut.

“That’s it. You’re in the doldrums because he wasn’t your type?” she asked.

“Do you want the marshmallow Milanos?” I asked back to deflect.

“Evan, talk to me.”

I focused on her to see she was very focused on me.

She was also worried.

“He was a great guy,” I said softly. “And I messed it up.”

“How’d a sweet, pretty girl like you mess it up?” she returned softly.

“It’s a long story,” I told her.

“Well, I got all day. But I know you don’t,” she said. “Still, I got all day, every day, and everything else on my body is goin’ south, some of it literally, but my ears work just fine. So, you wanna talk, I’m an old lady, my husband’s dead, but I remember the way it was and that it was hard work, finding a man.”

“I’m actually not in the market for a man, Gert. It was a blind date. I just…liked him.”

She tipped her head to the side. “And you can’t fix what you messed up?”

Mag had exited the premises with a slam of the door.

I doubted it.

But for his sake, I wouldn’t even try.

I shook my head.

Gert motored toward the Milanos, mumbling, “Shame.”

She had that right.

“Think about you,” she said, grabbing a pack of the toasted marshmallow Milanos. “I think about you all the time. Minute I met you, I was surprised you hadn’t gotten yourself claimed. But that happens a lot.”

She kept motoring.

And talking.

But I grabbed another pack of toasted marshmallow Milanos, and a double dark chocolate, both her favorites, because she’d be through the pack she nabbed in a day, but she also wouldn’t take three because she knew I’d eventually be buying them.

I tossed them in the cart, and she talked through it.

“Good ones, they fester, and I know why. And it’s a fool reason, men not wanting a woman who’s got a head on her shoulders and herself sorted. They gotta play the hero. They gotta be the fixer. They can’t be the one with the problems ’cause it’s all a competition for them and they can’t have their woman bestin’ them at somethin’. So the smart ones, the adjusted ones, they go to waste. And the men pick the crackpots, then moan that their woman is a hot mess when they looked right past that one who’d give them harmony.”

This sounded startlingly like my mother and Rob.

She shot me a semi-toothless grin and finished.

“I was a hot mess. My Stan sorted me out. Maybe you need to get yourself some trouble. Boys’ll swoop in like vultures.”

One could say I didn’t have to search far for that.

I gave her an uncommitted grin.

She reached out and touched my hand.

“You’ll find somebody, Evie. Someone perfect. I gotta believe that,” she said. “This world, lettin’ a girl like you be alone for too long, it’d be a world I don’t understand.”

I took hold of her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks, Gert.”

She clicked her teeth, I let her go, and she rounded the next endcap on two wheels.

Because that was the chip aisle.

And she did this saying, “Up for Applebee’s?”

The thought of sitting in Applebee’s attempting to enjoy a brisket quesadilla with that grocery bag in my trunk gave me the shivers.

Even so, I had a one-word reply.

“Always.”

By the time we’d unpacked groceries, enjoyed our dinner, I got Gert back to her house, and I was on my way home, I had an hour to figure out where to stash the stash, get to Smithie’s, gunk up my face and hair and get onstage.

I was going to have to be quick with the mascara.

The entire drive home, I did not come up with a good place to stash the stash.

I didn’t feel safe leaving it at home. A shady guy knew my phone number. Who knew what else Mick told him, who that guy was talking to, and regardless, he knew my name and the Internet made all sorts of information people shouldn’t have available in minutes.

I didn’t feel safe leaving it in my car in Smithie’s parking lot.

He had a secure parking lot, with lights and cameras.

Nevertheless.

Since I wasn’t going to pop it by my dad’s because he’d sell it, my sister’s, and get her tied up in this, and definitely I wasn’t going back to Mom’s because I didn’t want a scene, but also I didn’t want to face Rob’s disappointment that I wasn’t making his version of the right choice, I decided to leave it in my car.

Best-case scenario (as such) was hiding it under my makeup table at Smithie’s.

But I wouldn’t take it into Smithie’s.

I’d never do that to Smithie.

It seemed, all the way around, I had no good choices in this with anything.

In order not to have any neighbors seeing me yet again lugging around a Trader Joe’s bag, probably by now expecting me to pet it and mutter about “my precious,” I left it in the car as I went in to change out of my Computer Raiders uniform and into civvies to head to the strip club.

I stopped at the line of mailboxes to grab my mail and then dashed up the steps.

I opened my door, flipped on my light, took one step in, my mail fell out of my hands and I stopped dead.

My apartment was a mess.

No.

It was a disaster.

The stuffing from my vintage couch, my Urban Outfitters armchair and my cute, boho velvet Target floor cushion was everywhere.

My World Market toss pillows were decimated.

It looked like every door to every cupboard in the kitchen was open, the contents all over the countertops, and if those contents were breakable, they were broken.

My vinyl was skid marks across the floor.

My books were in a jumbled pile.

Keepsakes and sentimental knickknacks were also on the floor, some of them in pieces, because my shelves had been pulled down.

My TV was resting on its face on my rug.

Hanging planters and standing pots were down, dirt in mounds and sprays all over the floor where the containers had broken.

They’d even ripped my macramé pieces off the walls.

I was so shocked by what I saw, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, my mind was a blank.

And then I let out a truncated scream when fingers curled around my upper arm and I was yanked the one step I’d taken into my apartment, out of it.

I was again inert and shocked to silence when all I could see was Mag’s face, as well as his finger pointing in mine, and he was growling, “Do not move from here. In the doorframe, where I can see you.”

I forced myself to nod.