Vanessa hadn’t planned to assault a man at Trader Joe’s. She was not that kind of person. She couldn’t even kill a spider without feeling plagued by guilt. She was the kind of person who held doors for strangers and made dinner every Sunday for her neighbor Miss Tina, a white-haired woman who lived alone and wanted the company more than the dinner, or so Vanessa sensed. When passing a dog, Vanessa would always whisper, “Hey, pup,” and then look up at the dog walker with a congratulatory smile, as if they were responsible for the dog’s cuteness. Deep in her subconscious lingered a crisp, persistent image of herself on her deathbed, a single question appearing before her: Did you do good?
This preoccupation with kindness was her mother’s doing. When she was just entering grade school, Vanessa’s mom had taught her that, whenever she encountered a person, she should remember that someone had given birth to them and imagine all the effort, care, and pain it had taken to bring them into the world. “Everyone is loved” was her mom’s mantra. “So if you feel like being a jerk—don’t.” Vanessa had absorbed this lesson so fully it had followed her into adulthood as a reflexive habit, like holding her breath when driving past cemeteries or avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. She would look upon a stranger and conjure an image of their mother in metal stirrups, a slick of fine, bloody hair emerging from between her legs. It was the kind of thing she planned on one day confessing to the love of her life: Just so you know, whenever I meet someone, I kind of visualize their mother giving birth to them? The man—gentle, handsome, and supportive in the way of all hypothetical soulmates—would shake his head and smile, accepting her for the lovable weirdo she was.
But Vanessa did not have a soulmate, or a boyfriend, or even a promising Hinge match. If she had, she probably would have been out with him at 6 pm on Valentine’s Day, eating oysters and sipping champagne, instead of circling the Trader Joe’s parking lot in Bellingham, Washington. But here she was, twenty-eight and single, on a mission to buy ground turkey, black beans, and a can of diced tomatoes so she could make her mom’s famous Valentine’s chili.
It didn’t help that she was hungry. To be lonesome and well-fed was one thing, but to be lonesome and ravenous was another. She’d skipped lunch at work because one meeting had bled into another, which had bled into another, until her mind had dissociated from her body and she no longer registered the rumbling in her stomach as hunger but as a strange, distant event, like the ringing of someone else’s phone. Nor did it help that the Trader Joe’s parking lot was so chaotic even the man with the sign reading, “Hungry disabled veteran, anything helps!!” had a look on his face that said, Get me the fuck out of here. After shopping, Vanessa—following her mother’s example again—would sometimes bring this man a carne asada burrito or a prepackaged chef’s salad, which the man would accept with a cheerful nod and a peace sign.
As Vanessa circled the parking lot for the third time, she counted how many license plates bore the motto “Beautiful British Columbia.” By the time she squeezed her Honda Fit into a spot that was not technically a spot but rather an empty space at the end of a row, she was up to twenty-two. Vanessa didn’t mind the Canadians who crossed the border to do their grocery shopping. Who could blame them? The Canadian government did not subsidize dairy products, so they cost nearly twice as much in the suburbs of Vancouver. And, anyway, there was nothing illegal about coming into the US to buy milk and cottage cheese and Everything but the Bagel Greek Yogurt Dip. They were just people like her, with junk food appetites and dead mothers whose absence felt like a black hole at the center of their being, continually devouring everything around them and growing denser. Besides, she had heard the Costco parking lot was even worse.
On a good day, perhaps a sunny one in August when she wasn’t so hungry, she might even have considered the Canadians’ presence a good thing, not only because of the tax money they left behind but also because Vancouver was an international city, which meant that Trader Joe’s was the most cosmopolitan place in that otherwise homogeneous college town where Vanessa had lived for the past decade. Amid the aisles of scientifically engineered dessert products and frozen tikka masala, you could find people of all races and nationalities speaking languages she couldn’t even identify, which she found strangely moving.
But today she was hungry, and it was not sunny. Not even close. February is the most inhumane month, and the sky was spitting out little pellets of hail as Vanessa navigated the store’s too-narrow aisles—an indoor version of the parking lot. At least the croaking of her stomach was inaudible beneath the Hall & Oates streaming from the store’s invisible speakers, as though soft rock might distract the shoppers from the apocalyptic, zero-sum carnage unfolding within the store’s vaguely Hawaiian-themed walls. She’d strategically chosen a basket instead of a cart for the same reason she’d chosen her Honda Fit over an SUV: to be small, agile, and unobtrusive. All she wanted was to be back home, in the fleece snowman Target pajamas her mom had given her for Hanukkah years before, browning the ground turkey while an e-commerce retail specialist on Love Is Blind explained the importance of finding a partner with good credit.
She had banked on grabbing a free sample to allay her hunger, but the sample station was all out. According to the little chalkboard, the day’s offering had been Genoa salami and low-moisture mozzarella on a rosemary cracker. At the sight of the empty tray, the rage in her stomach stood on its hind legs, thrashed its multiple heads, and roared. Even the free coffee was gone.
It’s fine, she told herself. She would buy a snack and have some in the car on the way home. Maybe peanut butter pretzels. What she needed was to focus so she could get out of the store, drive home, and make the chili her mom had made each year on Valentine’s Day—a strange tradition that Vanessa had never understood or even liked until this year, her first winter without her mother, when it had become suddenly clear that life does not always promise abundance, or even a partner to have dinner with on a stupid corporate holiday. Sometimes you had to conjure your own joy. Scratch that. Most of the time you had to conjure your own joy. So you had better suck it up and start chopping onions.
Joy had been her mother’s specialty. She would sing made-up songs in the shower, make buttermilk waffles on weekdays, glue googly eyes to the microwave. She was like one of those machines where you pop in a quarter and receive a small toy that’s useless but delightful—except with her you didn’t even need a quarter. Vanessa was lucky, she knew, to have had such a mother for even a short while. Sometimes she still woke in the night wishing she could just send her a text. That was the thing about her mom: She was not only the toy machine but also the Walgreens where the machine lived, open 24/7 and offering everything Vanessa might need in an emergency—band-aids, crappy magazines, Benadryl, Bugles, tampons, floss. Should Vanessa experience a strange pain in her toe at two in the morning, she could text her mom, who would answer immediately: Want me to come look at it? Every moment since her death had felt like an emergency, and now there was nobody left to call. Her dad was not a Walgreens. He was a post office: reliable, professional, but with long lines and limited hours.
Vanessa grabbed a box of waffle mix—the buttermilk kind, not whole wheat, because this had been another of her mom’s mantras: Never make a treat healthy; you’ll just end up disheartened. Also in her basket: chocolate-covered banana slices, miniature mint-chocolate-chip ice-cream cones, and three bags of frozen mango chunks.
At last she came to the canned-goods aisle, where she set her eyes on the diced tomatoes, an essential part of the chili recipe. Without the tomatoes, the chili would be merely a pot of beans. Fart soup, her mom might have said, because her mom had loved nothing more than to toss the word fart at you like a ninja star, just to keep you on your toes. Vanessa was disturbed to find that only a single can of diced tomatoes remained. That was fine. Her mom’s recipe only called for one can. But still. A shopper must have cleared out their stock. Probably a Canadian. For years someone had operated a store in Vancouver called “Pirate Joe’s.” The owner would come to Trader Joe’s, buy up items by the dozen, and resell them across the border at a markup.
Vanessa was leaning in to grab the last remaining can of tomatoes when a large man in a Carhartt jacket thrust his shopping cart between Vanessa and the shelf. He grabbed the can, flung it into his cart, and then looked at her as if wondering why she was there. He was wearing a sweat-stained Canucks hat, his reflective sunglasses resting on the brim, and his cart was filled with milk. She could practically hear him thinking: What’s that sad look on your face a-boot?
On any other day she would have smiled, said sorry (even though she’d done nothing wrong), and let him have the tomatoes. She would have left the store, gone home, popped a personal pepperoni pizza into the toaster oven, and called it a day. Or maybe she would have eaten enough peanut butter pretzels in her car to refuel and then hit the corner market down the road to buy tomatoes there. But tonight she needed to get out of Trader Joe’s ASAP and go home and make her mom’s chili. She needed to FaceTime her dad and ask how he was holding up. She needed to listen to one of her mom’s old voicemails, the more ordinary the message the better: Sorry to miss you, Nessie, I’ll try you later, hope you had a good day, bye! She needed tomatoes, and there was no way in hell she was going to another grocery store to get them. These tomatoes were hers. This was her town. Her Trader Joe’s. Her dead mom. She had first dibs.
“Um, sir? I was actually going to take that can of tomatoes.” She was not used to confronting strangers and immediately felt her heartbeat tick up and her palms grow slick with sweat.
He frowned at her like, Oh, you’re going to make this a thing? “OK. Well. I actually just took it? Maybe they’ll restock soon. Sorry.”
She looked him in the eye and tried to picture his mother giving birth to him, but all she saw was a deranged, malevolent stork, with patchy feathers and a black beak, dropping a newborn into a bubbling pool of American dairy products, and a subterranean milk creature reaching up a slimy tentacle to bring him to her teat. This didn’t make sense, but she was in no mood for logic. “It’s just—I was here first. And I need the tomatoes for a recipe.”
“Well, what if I need them for a recipe, too?”
“Do you?”
“No, but I might.”
“Well, I do need them for something I’m making tonight. And it’s really important.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And my plans aren’t important?”
“Can I please just have the can? Please?”
“No,” he said, and then he sniffed a drip of snot back into his cavernous, Canadian nostril. It was the way he said it. As though he were in charge of the grocery store, in charge of her. She wondered if he was actually a demon sent from hell to fuck with her, if he had been the one to sign off on her mother’s death, taking the clipboard from the devil himself, the word cancer in bold at the top, her mother’s name bulleted somewhere under the “stomach” section. Looks a-boot right, boss. Because even in hell, he was still Canadian.
For once—just this once—Vanessa wanted to be in control, to be the one with the clipboard, signing off on someone else’s bad luck. She suddenly felt the different colors of her rage come together inside her, interlocking to create a large, aggressive machine of war, like the Power Rangers uniting to form a Megazord. (Where did that come from? She hadn’t watched Power Rangers in years. But, come to think of it, her mother had always liked watching the show with Vanessa after school. She’d called them the “Rainbow Fighter Kids.”)
The attack happened in a split second but seemed to stretch out forever. Vanessa would always be attacking the Canadian. “Private Eyes” by Hall & Oates would always be playing in the background. The woman in a floral muumuu down the aisle would always be inspecting the label on a box of cinnamon granola. Rage would always be circulating in Vanessa’s torso: bright, hot magenta.
What technically happened was that she clawed the man’s face, the stubbly hairs on his cheek catching beneath her nails, followed by the rubbery flesh of his lips, the hardness of his teeth. She felt the surprise of his breath on her fingers, hot and wet, and she made a mental note to wash her hands when this was all over, because his spit was on her skin now. His DNA.
As soon as her hand connected with his face, the man shrieked and grabbed her by the shoulders to hold her back. In response she kneed him in the crotch—blam, just like in the movies—and he buckled. While he was down, she reached into his cart, retrieved the can of tomatoes, and placed it in her basket. She also took his great white northern beans and corn salsa, just to make a point.
The lady in the floral muumuu was probably calling the cops by then, so Vanessa ran from the store with her basket in hand—her first time ever stealing, unless you counted the screen-cleaning cloths she took from work, which she did not. Her hands were shaking as she started her car and raced out of the parking lot, which was still a clusterfuck. Her tires screeched. Her mom had hated when people peeled out. “Is this the Indy 500?” she would say.
But Vanessa kept on driving.
At home, hands still shaking, Vanessa tried to resume her evening as though nothing had happened. She pulled up her mom’s recipe—saved in a desktop folder labeled “Mama”—and arranged the ingredients on the counter. She chopped the onions and peppers, drained the beans, opened the can of tomatoes. She put oil in a pot and began to brown the onions. When it was time for salt, she realized the shaker was empty. She went to the pantry for the blue container of Morton’s to find that only a small, hard lump remained. The onions were in the pot, sizzling. She was about to break down when she remembered something else her mother had once told her: “Life is a shit sandwich, Vanessa, and every day is a fresh bite.” She’d said it with a happy smile on her face like, What are you gonna do? Not eat?
Vanessa gathered herself, turned off the burner, and put on her coat. This was about doing what needed to be done, about being an adult.
On the drive to Safeway for salt, she got stuck at a light. As she sat there, giant trucks on all sides, her windshield fogging up, stomach still growling, Vanessa couldn’t stop the tears that had been building in her all day. She cried over all of it: Her longing for her mom. Her sadness for her dad. Her guilt for sometimes wishing it had been her dad who’d died instead. Her shame for assaulting a perfect stranger and then shoplifting. For the way she’d flown past the homeless veteran with the sign without her usual wave. For thinking the homeless guy needed her wave when what he obviously needed was a house—and maybe her basket of stolen groceries.
Buried somewhere in all this emotional filth was the fact that her mom had loved her. That she would have forgiven Vanessa for all of it. “We all have bad days,” she would have said. “This is one of them. Tomorrow will be different.”
Vanessa conjured an image of the Canadian’s mother in a hospital room with a nurse. She set the season to October, a maple tree glowing bright red outside the window. His mother had red hair, as red as the tree, sweat pasting her bangs to her forehead, her whole body exhausted, her entire life narrowed into a pinpoint that was this miracle of agony between her legs. Everything was about to change. A final eruption of pain, and suddenly the room was different. It held an entirely new person the size of a butternut squash, a person she had created. She reached out and took the squash into her arms, where she held him as though the fate of the world depended on him and him alone. Her baby. Her son. What wonderful things would he do? She looked into his eyes, a fire hose of love spraying out of her, drenching everything her gaze touched, mostly the baby but also the nurse and the window and the red tree beyond it. Staring into her baby’s gummy blue eyes, she realized she would never be able to turn off or control this hose. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. Even once she had disappeared from the earth, the hose would continue to spray without interruption, raining love down on her son and everything and everyone around him. That was the real nature of the world: love showering in all directions, from invisible sources, drenching everything, trying its best to fight the tiny fires people keep making for no good reason at all.
