“Eh. I like Josephine.”
Of course he does.
He likes it because he’s difficult and doesn’t give a shit that no one else calls me that, not even my grandmother—except when she’s scolding me.
“Can we call me something neat, too? Like Smooth Talking Criminal or Night Dove?”
“Night Dove?” He lowers the sunglasses to gaze down at me. “No comment.”
“Listen, Dink, you do not get to pick what we call me.”
We bicker as we stroll along, filling the cart with more food than two people can possibly eat in a two-week period, and I wonder who’s going to cook it all.
Not me.
“Josephine, should I get this?” I look over to find Duke—wig and hat and all, looking decidedly like a professional wrestler you’d see on television—than the simple man he’s desperately trying to portray.
He’s holding a watermelon in one hand, balancing it on his palm like a basketball player.
As if it weighs nothing at all.
“Uh. Sure?”
Duke stows it in the bottom of the cart where he’s slid a pack of two dozen water bottles.
Doesn’t he know the water from the tap is just as good?
“Josephine, do you like chips and salsa?”
He’s got a bag of tortilla chips in one hand and a jar of salsa in the other.
“Um. It’s not my favorite.” But it’s everyone else’s. I can see that he isn’t sure whether or not to place it in the cart, so I ask him a follow-up question. “Would you rather have that or the cheese chips you picked out?”
“Cheese chips.”
Honestly, he needs to stop grabbing shit. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When’s the last time you were grocery shopping?”
He removes the hat on his head to scratch at his scalp, then squints up at the ceiling, toward the fluorescent lights. “That’s a good question. I’d have to say a few years?”
A few years!
No wonder he’s treating this like a free-for-all!
“Who does your shopping?”
“Housekeeper.” He sets the OREOS back on the shelf. “And the cook.”
That figures.
By the end of this outing, I’m exhausted, grateful that he nabbed a cooked rotisserie chicken for dinner so there won’t be anything to prepare when we get back to my place, along with a few hot deli items to eat with it.
When he whips out a black metal credit card at the end, I breathe a sigh of relief, shoulders relaxing because the total had me gasping out loud.
“I can take a vacation with all the money you just spent,” I tell him as we’re unloading everything from my car to the kitchen. Duke has both arms loaded with bags, hanging like coconuts on a palm tree, and me with my puny few.