Mrs. Harper is at the register, checking out a customer, a man in a flannel jacket who is buying a shocking amount of canned baked beans.
She’s wearing a navy blue shirt.
All the blood drains from my face, and I feel lightheaded.
This is the first time I have seen her wearing any color but black since her husband died of a heart attack more than a year ago.
And yet navy blue is very close in nature to black. In certain lights, navy can be confused with black, which creates a rather unfortunate dilemma for me.
As I make my way under the various deer, moose, and even bear heads mounted on the walls, I wonder if Mrs. Harper has worn navy by mistake. Could it have looked like black in the early-morning light? Or might she be slowly transitioning her way to brighter colors, and if so, what would that mean? Have I been given the proverbial green light or not?
I dare to glance back over my shoulder, seeing that her silver hair is down. It rises like a wave over her forehead before it dives along the left side of her beautiful face.
Mrs. Harper has what I can only describe as a gorgeous Jewish nose, and for some unknown reason, the noses of Jewish women always stir up the dormant lust within me.
Behind the bread aisle I quickly adjust myself, because I am embarrassingly aroused.
Ridiculous.
All of this.
I started imagining a life together with Mrs. Harper long before her husband died. It was never sexual so much as it was intellectually stimulating. She never really says much when she scans groceries, hardly ever smiles, and so it was easy to graft stories onto her and her beautiful angular nose. I imagined her trapped in a sexless cold marriage with a man who named a store after himself and loved it more than the wife he also named after himself. I imagined meeting Mrs. Harper accidentally on one of the walking trails Albert Camus and I often stroll in the summer, the three of us falling into stride—in my fantasy I am cane- and limp-free—perhaps even talking about the novels we are reading at the time. Before long she is sneaking away from her husband to have dinner at my home in the woods, confiding in me, telling me all of her secrets over the meat her husband cut and weighed himself earlier in the day. Turns out, Mr. Harper is a woefully inadequate lover who finishes much too early and is snoring less than thirty seconds after he rolls off his wife. “The shame,” she says through tears. “He’s never once given me an orgasm. Not once in thirty years.” And I pat her hand sympathetically. “It’s like I’m an object. Just a warm mitten for his dick,” she says after one too many glasses of wine. “Are other men any different?” In my fantasy I tell her that I would make her buzz in the bedroom until her heart was content, and she places her hand on her chest and blushes. And then one snowy night I see two lights glowing like God’s eyes through the blizzard, winding their way up my driveway, and I open the door and she comes bounding out of her truck without even putting it in park. I wrap my arms around her as her husband’s vehicle continues slowly into the snowbank. “I’ve left him,” she says, and I say, “Welcome home.”
In real life, Mr. Harper was a curmudgeonly cheap hairy WASP of a little ape in a white butcher’s apron, always pressing his thumb to the scale when he was weighing your meat.
He killed things for fun, forever hanging carcasses up outside his shop and selling his freshly murdered cuts inside. He had an arsenal behind glass and sold his guns freely to all of the local yokels and rich yuppie skiers who also seasonally purchased his overpriced bottles of wine, local microbrewed beers, cheeses made from the milk of Vermont goats and cows, and whatever else they didn’t feel like driving forty-five minutes to get at the nearest chain grocery store. These sales made Mr. Harper a wealthy man. A beautiful wife and a cash machine of a store. One of the biggest houses around these parts, nestled at the center of an ocean of land, overlooking a private pond. You’d think the old bastard would have known happiness, but he was meaner than a bee in your mouth.
I’ve overheard patrons whispering that Mr. Harper died in the store while marking up the high-end whiskey and scotch, just before ski season.
Dead before his head hit the floor, they say, but somehow managing not to break a single bottle, because he was a frugal bastard to the very end.
And that’s when Mrs. Harper started wearing all black.
“Two rib eye steaks—one big, one small,” I tell the middle-aged butcher behind the counter, and he pulls two cuts from the window and begins to wrap them in wax paper.
“Your little dog eats better than most people,” Brian says.
I know his name is Brian, because he wears a name tag. He started working here shortly after Mr. Harper died. I think he runs the place for Mrs. Harper, who has remained a silent and beautiful fixture behind the cash register.
I nod and smile.
“Why don’t you bring the little guy in here anymore? I miss seeing him,” he says as he weighs the steaks. He doesn’t leave his thumb on the scale, I notice.
“He gets a little anxious lately,” I say.
“What’s his name again?”
“Albert.”
“I heard you use a last name too when you were talking to him. What was it again?”
“Camus. Albert Camus.”
Brian itches his goatee with his wrist and says, “How’d you ever come up with a crazy name like that? Albert Cah-mooooo?”
“I named him after the French writer.”
“That explains it. I don’t even read American writers.”
“Maybe you should read Albert Camus.”
“Why?” Brian says as he passes the meat over the counter. He’s smiling at me, and there’s a twinkle in his eye. He’s just making small talk as he takes off his disposable gloves.