One More Day by Kelly Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

anymore.
    Like so many things, she wanted to take it all back.

• • •
    The night before Ben came back, John and Carrie had stopped at Trader Joe’s to get milk and eggs, but Carrie had waited in the car. John had started buying most of their groceries, had gotten in the habit of it during the months when Carrie refused to leave the house. At first, she had thought he was being helpful, but then it had started to grate. She had asked him point-blank: Don’t you trust me to do anything? Do you think I’ll lose the fucking lettuce too? He’d bitten his tongue and told her not to be silly, that he didn’t care who bought what. But the truth was that John liked to choose the spring mix with the big set of tongs, to squeeze the cucumbers, to see the eye of the fish. If they wanted half a tray of lasagna, he seemed to glimpse something in the plastic containers that Carrie didn’t—as if the way the cheese was nestled in between the meat and noodles and the pattern of the herbs peeking through meant something, mattered. It’s noodles , she’d say, shaking her head as he compared one package to another. Not a Rorschach test.
    Sometimes she went inside with him, to the farmers’ market or Trader Joe’s or even 7-Eleven, and sometimes she tired of his specificity. On that particular night, she’d let him shop alone. She’d squinted through the windshield. She’d never noticed it before, but from the angled parking spot, through the line of squat trees that paralleled the sidewalk, she could see down the road, the corner of the Starbucks sign.
    How long had it been? When she tried, she could still conjure the particular concert of tastes on her tongue, the sweetness, but always the bite of the acid. She closed her eyes and thought of it, felt the pull of memory and hunger.
    A careful, perfectionist woman doesn’t allow herself many indulgences. At least, not many they would confess to. Carrie’s indulgences were occasional messiness, occasional laziness, but always, always caffeine. For her, it had started long before the current coffee craze had taken hold, when she struggled to stay awake in high school. Some days she went straight from school to her job at the Gap, then stayed up till two a.m. doing homework. She’d gotten in the habit of not only drinking coffee with her mother in the mornings before school, but also taking whatever was left over in the pot as an iced coffee for the afternoon. Add in a Coke at lunch and she was pretty much buzzed all day, nearly every day. Going to college and studying all night, then becoming a parent only exacerbated her need.
    Ben had been a terrible sleeper in the beginning, always hungry, often restless. They’d tried four different kinds of pacifiers and two types of baby swings before he finally learned to settle. Back in the days before he started walking, when he was still relatively happy being in a stroller, she’d taken him anywhere there were Starbucks stores. She was comforted by the speed and familiarity of her favorite brand. She liked the little scones that fit so well into Ben’s hand. She took pride in her complicated drink order, the tangle of flavor and size and embellishment rolling off her tongue proudly, as if she were reciting a long, complicated poem for an appreciative audience. She enjoyed the challenge of plucking a single balsa wood stirrer from a thick gaggle of them. She liked knowing exactly where the napkins were.
    The baristas stopped writing her name on her cup—they knew her. Her order was her own, like a signature or hairstyle, quirky and telling, a little sweet, a hint of salt, complicated. She liked to think she was the only one who ordered it, but once, standing in line, she heard another woman, old enough to be her mother at least, ask for her coffee with one pump of chocolate, one pump of caramel, sprinkle of salt, no whipped cream , and she felt her cheeks