SHANNON IS SEARCHING for the barcode on a box of trash bags when a commotion breaks out near the self-checkout registers. A male voice, strident: “—coupon says buy two get the third free! It’s right here, I’m looking at it!”
Dennis’s voice, low and soothing, indistinct.
The customer: “It’s only expired by a week!”
The fluorescent lights are giving Shannon a headache. Scanner beeping, she pushes a box of trash bags down the conveyor belt. She keys in the code for a head of lettuce: forty-two-ninety-nine . . . no, that’s broccoli. Pressing delete, she starts over.
The man is still shouting about his free package of lunch meat; a small crowd has gathered. The guy reaches into his cart and throws the lunch meat at Dennis before flinging a package of toilet paper and upending a domed rotisserie chicken onto the floor. A bright red tomato slaps Shannon’s Lane Open sign and bursts, spraying seeds and juice. The man kicks a box of diapers toward the produce section. The cashier at the next register, Tony, mutters, “He’s somebody’s parent?”
Shannon reaches beneath her register for a roll of paper towels. “I’m so sorry,” she tells the customers standing in line. The new girl—Tracy? Stacy?—appears with a mop in one hand and looks at Dennis. He waves her away. Another customer stomps forward. “Hey asshat, you almost just hit my kid with a can of beans.”
“Punch him!” calls a woman rooting through the avocado bin. A couple of people begin chanting, “Punch him! Punch him!”
Tony is chanting along with the customers but stops when he sees Shannon looking at him. The coupon man leaves the store as Tracy lifts the chicken by one leg, dropping it into its plastic box.
Shannon passes a receipt to her customer. The scanner beeps as she sends boxes of pasta and cereal skidding down the belt. “Find everything okay?”
The coupon man storms back through the sliding doors to shout obscenities. A group of teenaged boys advances on him and he runs back outside, the boys following. A handful of customers—and Tony—cheer them on.
In the break room an hour later, Alison from deli says to Shannon, “I’ve been on two dates with someone I met online—he’s from Thailand originally but he just moved here from the U.K. Your husband is Asian, right?” She twirls a plastic spoon into a single-serving carton of yogurt. “My mom is okay with it—except she mispronounced his name when I introduced them, but my stepdad is being a complete jerk. Did you ever have to deal with anything like that when you started dating your husband?”
Shannon says, “Mm, not really.” She wonders at Alison introducing her new boyfriend to her family after just two dates.
Three hours later she climbs behind the wheel of her Toyota, digging in her purse for her phone. She pulls up yesterday’s thread with Justin. Her last half-dozen messages are in all-caps and filled with heated exclamation points. His are littered with cool K’s and Let’s talk about this later’s. His last message reads: I’m sorry.
At home, Rigley comes barreling into the kitchen, jumping up to paw at her shins. Olivia is in the bathroom, smearing Shannon’s cruelty-free limited edition lipstick over her face and making duck lips at the mirror. Shannon caps the tube. “Go do your homework.”
“There’s no school for one-two-three-four days!”
“But there’s still homework.” She rubs a tissue over Livy’s mouth. Shannon washes her hands, pops out her contact lenses. “Did anybody let Rigley out?”
“I did!”
“Good job, honey. Where’s your brother?”
“His room.” She’s doing somersaults down the carpeted hallway.
Shannon strips off her ugly orange smock, choosing a fitted navy blouse, Justin’s favorite color. She looks for her glasses, finding them in the drawer of her nightstand.
Dirty dishes and toys are strewn across the sofa and the coffee table. “Brayden!”
“What?” His voice has a newly acquired adolescent crack. He appears in the doorway and she’s startled by how tall he’s gotten. He looks like Justin—dark watchful eyes and broad shoulders. “Do you have homework?”
“I did it already.”
“Let me see.”
“Jeez, Mom, I said I did it, okay? I’m in seventh grade, not first.”
Livy and Rigley go racing through the kitchen and into the dining room. “I’m in fourth grade and next year I’ll be in fifth grade and Brayden has a girlfriend and her name is Teesha Michaels!”
“Shut up.”
Shannon roots through the cupboard for the cumin and the chili powder. Dennis has sent a text: can she come in early tomorrow? Stacy just quit and two people are out sick. Shannon doesn’t respond; she has no desire to get up at four a.m. in order to stock shelves with canned goods and boxes of crackers before standing behind a cash register for eight hours.
They make tacos. Brayden’s phone is propped on the countertop, a video playing. He stares at the screen as he tears open a package of tortillas. A swarm of ants spiral; it looks like a tiny cyclone.
Shannon runs the greasy spatula under the tap. “What are you watching?”
“It’s called an ant mill.”
“What’s that?”
“All the other ants follow the first one to the food. They’re blind and sometimes the trail crosses the path of another ant colony. They get confused by the smell and keep going in a circle ‘til they starve to death.”
Olivia is having trouble with fractions. Brayden rolls his eyes when Shannon asks him to go help her. His voice drifts into the kitchen, “No, that’s backwards, that’s why it’s not coming out right. You’re supposed to divide it, not times it.”
Shannon glances at the clock. This morning, before he left for work, Justin had said, “I’ll probably be late tonight.”
“Again?” Shannon lifted a pile of bills and opened drawers, looking for her nametag.
“It’s end of quarter.” He checked his hair in the microwave’s reflection.
Her nametag was in the vegetable crisper. “Brayden, there’s leftover chicken casserole on the top shelf and Livy can have a juice box but just one. No cookies, either of you.”
“’Kay. Bye, Dad.” Brayden carried his bowl of cereal into the living room.
Livy came skidding into the kitchen. “Yay, no school!”
Shannon opened the backdoor for Rigley. “You still have homework. Get that done today so you’re not scrambling on Sunday night.” She watched Justin’s face as he checked his phone.
He slid it into his pocket and said to Livy, “And there’s parent-teacher conferences tomorrow night. Are we going to hear good things about you from Mrs. Conrad?”
“Yes?”
Shannon leaned over the counter and Justin kissed the edge of her mouth, his lips mostly catching her cheek. He said, “Love you. Don’t forget to pick up bread.”
“See you tonight. Have a good day.”
The tacos are ready. Shannon texts Justin and when there’s no response by five-forty, the three of them sit down to dinner.
“Mmm.” Livy crunches her corn tortilla, grease running down her wrists. She’s filled her shell with ground beef and plopped a giant spoonful of sour cream on top. Shannon piles hers with shredded lettuce and chopped tomatoes and fried onions. Last year she tried coaxing the whole family into going vegan but they mutinied after three days.
Bray eats six tacos in rapid succession and loads up a seventh with black olives and shredded cheese. Livy’s sour cream slides off her taco onto her plate. She scoops it up with her spoon and licks it, humming with appreciation. “Where’s Daddy?”
“At work. Don’t talk with your mouth full, please.”
Shannon loads the dishwasher. It’s six-twenty. She texts Justin again: Home soon? Brayden is smirking at his phone and Livy is talking to her Barbie dolls. Shannon runs her fingers through her daughter’s fine dark hair.
She goes through the living room and the kids’ rooms, gathering empty cups and greasy crumpled potato chip bags and dirty laundry. She finds a bottle of purple-glitter nail polish in the sofa cushions and a banana peel beneath the TV stand. Justin’s laptop is on the coffee table. Shannon lifts the lid and taps enter. She doesn’t know the password.
Sitting at the kitchen table, she logs onto social media on her phone. Last week Justin said, “Why do you even go on there? All it does is upset you. You’re addicted.”
“I’m addicted to outrage, not to social media.”
After admiring the photo her dad has posted of a male cardinal tilting its head to feed a seed to its mate, their orange beaks fitted together like the pieces of a puzzle, she checks to see if her best friend, Wendy, is online. Should she get up and make a pan of hot water for her feet or wait until Justin gets home and see if he offers to rub them for her?
She scrolls through her notifications, getting into a brief argument with a cousin over politics. Her brother-in-law, Bruce, just posted what looks like a lengthy joke: A guy and a gal walk into a bar . . . Halfway through, Shannon realizes the punchline is something to do with mocking transgender people. She types, Really, Bruce?
Just a joke, is the immediate reply. Shannon removes Bruce from her contact list and takes another swipe at her cousin before logging off. Today would have been her grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The last time Shannon had seen her—in a cramped room in a hospice facility, the underside of her grandmother’s legs and the soles of her feet stained deep purple, a urine bag beneath the railed bed swinging gently, half-filled with muddy liquid—her grandma had been hoarse from screaming. A nurse adjusted the blinds. “She’s had a rough morning. Just needs a little rest, isn’t that right, Miss Dolores?”
Her grandmother died the next day, at eleven-forty a.m. Shannon had been halfway through her shift at the grocery store. In her darker moments, she thinks her grandma was the last link to her own mother, although she sometimes detects echoes of her mom in the shape of Brayden’s nose, in the peal of Livy’s laughter.
Livy says, “When is Daddy coming home?” Her Barbie dolls are wearing silver and gold ball gowns. Tiny high heels and purses and bikini tops in every shade of the rainbow litter the floor. It’s six-fifty.
“Soon.” She should vacuum the carpets and mop the kitchen floor. Somebody spilt juice on the linoleum in front of the fridge. She calls Wendy. Logan answers and recites the alphabet before Wendy commandeers the phone, sounding harassed. “Listen, I’ll call you back. The dog caught a rabbit in the backyard and while I was trying to take it away Logan pooped his pants.”
A text has come in but it’s not from Justin; it’s her sister. Did you block Bruce?? Shannon taps out: Yep.
Brayden is slumped and slack-faced, playing a video game, only his thumbs and his eyes moving. Olivia has abandoned her dolls and sits cross-legged on her bedroom floor, sorting Legos into piles by color. Shannon calls Justin but it goes straight to voicemail. Livy and Rigley cuddle up next to her on the sofa to watch TV and eat popcorn. During the first commercial break she texts Justin again. It’s seven-forty-five.
She’s just put Livy to bed and gone into the bedroom to change into her pajamas when her phone rings, jarring in the dim silence of the bedroom.
“Hi,” she says, tugging off her socks.
It’s not Justin. It’s someone else, some woman. The woman is asking if this is Justin Lee’s wife. There’s been an incident. Not an accident—an incident. From far away, Shannon hears her own voice ask, “What incident?”
She hears the other woman’s words, tries to arrange them in her mind: Attack, parking lot, brain swelling.
Grabbing her purse, she tells Brayden to go to bed by ten. Keys, where are her keys?
The stop lights and street signs are shimmery through her tears. Incident sounds so mild—a speeding ticket or a bounced check. We had a good morning. We fought yesterday, but we made up last night and we had a good morning.
She’s not sure where to park, finally finding an open spot on the roof. The metal steps clatter beneath her tennis shoes as she flings herself down, down. “Where’s the information desk?”
A girl with blue hair points toward the elevators. “First floor.”
Words and half-phrases pierce the layers of denial, colliding with one another to create confusing images. Wasn’t she just sitting on the couch watching TV with Livy, waiting for Justin to text her? Traumatic brain injury. Medically induced coma. We need a signature. Is he an organ donor? Does he have an end of life directive?
“I don’t know!” Shannon cries.
A policewoman approaches. More questions, more words without meaning. Hate crime, perpetrators still at large.
There were witnesses. Witnesses who said the attackers used racial slurs. Witnesses who did not intervene as two men kicked her husband in the back, as they punched him in the neck from behind, as they stomped on her husband’s precious head with their dirty fucking ignorant boots. Shannon says stupidly, “He was born in Cleveland.”
This is a case of mistaken identity; there’s been a clerical error somewhere. There are thousands of Lee’s. They’ll need to call someone else’s wife, someone else’s family, once Shannon peers into the hospital room and feels the rushed sag of relief, the depersonalized flare of pity.
The doctor warns her but still she gags at the sight of the swollen eggplant eyes, the nose hugely swollen, the stitched lips, the head shaved and swathed in bandages. Tubes and monitors. The smell of antiseptic. The lenses of her glasses are splattered with dried tears. Justin lies very still beneath the white sheet.
A nurse checks his pulse. Justin would hate this: being the center of attention, dependent on strangers, helpless to tend to his own needs. He wears his competence like a worn-in sweater, well-fitting and familiar. Shannon only ever wears indignation, like a shield of armor, forever battering up against other hard things.
She lays cold fingers on his arm, tells him, “Honey, I’m here now.” She says, “Honey, you’re going to be just fine.”
The policewoman needs to speak with her and they step into the white hallway, the fluorescent lights stinging Shannon’s gritty eyes. People in scrubs push carts, going in and out of rooms. Shannon wants to know what the police are doing. “Why are you here talking to me instead of out searching for these people?”
The officer is kind, informative, polite. Her eyes are a rich deep brown speckled with flecks of gold. Shannon thinks of never seeing Justin’s eyes again and begins to shake. The police office presses a business card into her hand before striding away, off to some other emergency. Shannon runs down the corridor in search of a restroom sign. Bitter vomit splashes the commode: the popcorn, the tacos.
Back in Justin’s room, she hovers. Can he hear her? She has always wondered this about coma patients. “You’ll tell me.” Shannon strokes the back of his hand. “When you wake up, you’ll tell me what it was like, okay?”
What is she supposed to tell the kids? Justin would know what to do. He always knows what to do. She doesn’t. Shannon guesses and experiments and makes shit up as she goes. She rages and thaws and changes her mind and goes up and comes back down again. Justin is the steady one, her anchor.
The night is spent alternately checking on him and trying to get comfortable on the lopsided cot beneath the window.
The sun is crawling over the roofs of dreary buildings. She waits until six-thirty before texting Wendy. She needs to go home; the kids will be confused. But he’s about to wake up, Shannon feels certain. She needs to be here when he wakes up.
Had she said I love you to him this morning—yesterday morning now? She can’t remember; she thinks he said I love you and she replied, Have a good day.
“I love you,” she whispers against his ear. Where is his phone? She’ll ask the next nurse that comes in.
They met when they were twenty-three and twenty-four, at a rally to protest the sale of companion animals bred in puppy-mills. Shannon stood shivering in her second-hand winter coat, faux-fur hood pulled tight around her face, wind cutting through her gloves, numbing the fingers holding up the cardboard sign she’d spray-painted: Shame on Parkland Pet Store!
A tall Asian man approached, handing her a thermos filled with fragrant coffee. “Who are you?” he asked bluntly and she said, “I’m Shannon. People call me Shan. Who are you?”
“Justin. People call me Justin.” He had watchful eyes and a serious face. He nodded at her sign. “I don’t think a drawing of a hand giving the pet store the middle finger is going endear people to our cause.”
“My other sign says: ‘Fuck Parkland. Let’s kidnap all the puppies and burn the pet store to the fucking ground.’”
He smiled then, just the slightest tipping up of the left corner of his mouth. They were married ten months later.
Brayden texts her at seven-ten. Did Dad go in to work early? When are you coming home?
Shannon types, Dad had to go to Milwaukee for work. I’ll be home in a few hours. We’re out of Lucky Charms. Give Livy Cheerios and choc milk. You can make bacon if you want. Rig gets half a cup. Don’t leave Livy alone. Love you.
Wendy responds. My God, Shan. Should I come there or go check on the kids?
A nurse comes in carrying a tray of instruments: thermometer and blood pressure cuff and syringe and clean rolls of gauze. Shannon asks about the phone and the nurse says she’s not sure. Maybe the police took it as evidence. She replies to Wendy: I think he’s going to wake up soon and then I’ll go home.
The nurse leaves and Shannon laces her fingers with Justin’s. She closes her eyes, just for a minute. She’ll hear him when he wakes up. Quietly, she tells him the story of the first time they met: the bitter wind, the cars flying by on Highway Ten, the shared thermos of hot coffee.
The muted beeps of the machines and the faint clatter of wheeled carts and low voices in the hallway lull her into a drugged drowsiness. It’s Saturday, finally; Shannon is supposed to go to an animal-rights protest this morning. She signed up and confirmed but it’s so cold when she wakes up to take her roommate’s Pomeranian out for a quick pee. The apartment’s property manager tells her off for letting Muffin urinate on the front lawn instead of taking him to the designated area and Shannon waves an apology. She picks Muffin up and hurries back into the entryway, heat blasting from the overhead vents. An old man is turning the key in his mailbox.
Shannon doesn’t go to the protest. Checking the clock, she realizes her mistake—today is the day she meets Justin and now she hasn’t, she didn’t; she won’t cross paths with him, not ever, not once in their whole entire lives.
Racing through the apartment, Shannon searches for coat, purse, keys, phone, work badge. Everything eludes her. In the apartment parking lot, none of the cars are hers. She’s speeding to the location of the protest but she’s blind, she can’t see, she’s lost, where is it? When she arrives the parking lot is empty of cars, the windows of the store dark. He’s here, he must be. If she looks hard enough, if she looks long enough, she’ll find him.
He’s not anywhere. Not in the parking lot, or inside the pet store, or the empty classrooms or deserted hallways of her high school, or the kitchen or the basement of the house she grew up in. “Justin!” she calls, over and over again, until her throat is raw. “Justin!”
She drives home, except it’s her real house, the one she lives in now—and he’s there, standing in their bedroom, loosening his tie, the pale blue one with the navy dots. Shannon says, “I thought I lost you.”
A few minutes later she startles awake and turns to tell Justin, “I just had the strangest dream,” before she remembers. Her fingers tighten around his. Shannon says, “I did find you. You’re right here.”
— JESSICA HWANG
Jessica Hwang’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in more than a dozen literary journals, including: Mystery Magazine, Tough, Shotgun Honey, Uncharted, The Rockford Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for the 2023 Best American Short Stories and Best American Mysteries and Suspense anthologies, and was nominated for the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. She lives near Minneapolis and is currently working on a mystery novel.