"You ever been to a Costco?" Clay asked.
It was a Tuesday morning, early, the diner not open yet. He was standing at the end of the counter with a clipboard and a pen behind his ear, frowning at a list that went on for two pages.
"No," I said.
"Course you haven't." He tore the list off the clipboard and folded it into his shirt pocket. "Get your jacket. Manny can open. You're coming with me."
"Is it like Walmart?" I asked.
Clay considered this seriously. "It's like if Walmart went to the gym," he said. "And then got really into buying in bulk."
* * *
It was further up the highway, past the Walmart and the strip of restaurants and the car dealerships with their lines of shining trucks and their flags snapping in the wind. The building was even bigger than I'd imagined. A huge gray box under a sky that had decided, for once, to be blue, the mountains standing sharp and white all around the valley as if someone had cut them out of paper.
The parking lot was full. Not almost full. Full, at eight-thirty in the morning, cars circling like hawks waiting for a space.
"Is something happening?" I asked. "A festival?"
"Nope," Clay said. "Tuesday."
We parked at the far end. As we walked toward the building, I started noticing the license plates. I'd learned what they were, the little metal rectangles on every car, from Sari, who'd explained them to me with an expression like she was explaining to a toddler why the sky was blue. Most of the ones in Kalispell were white with mountains on them and the word Montana. But here, row after row, half of them were different. White and blue. Some with a wild rose. Some with the words Wild Rose Country. Some with a small crown.
"Alberta," Clay said, following my gaze. "British Columbia. Canadians."
"Canadians?" I asked.
"They come down for the gas and the groceries. Border's only an hour or so north. Exchange rate's good, prices are better, no sales tax in Montana. You'll see whole families with three carts each. Loading up their trunks like it's the end of the world," Clay said.
"They cross the border? A whole country's border? For groceries?" I asked.
"For a good deal on toilet paper, honey, people will cross just about anything," Clay said.
I thought about that while we walked across the vast lot, past a car with a crown on the plate whose trunk was so full of paper towels that the lid wouldn't close and had been tied down with a bungee cord.
People would cross a border for a good deal. For something that mattered to them. Something they wanted badly enough.
I wondered what else they'd cross a border for. I wondered if any of them had ever crossed one they couldn't come back over.
* * *
Inside, the store was a canyon of metal shelves stacked up to the ceiling with pallets of things, and everything was enormous. Not just the store. The things. Jars of peanut butter as big as my head. Bags of rice I couldn't have lifted with both arms. A tub of animal crackers shaped like a bear that would have fed an army. Ketchup in a container like a fire extinguisher.
"Why does anyone need this much ketchup?" I asked.
"I need this much ketchup," Clay said, and heaved two of them into the flatbed cart. "I run a diner."
He moved through the store like a man who'd done it a thousand times, which he had. Flour. Sugar. Eggs in flats of sixty. Coffee in cans the size of paint buckets. Bacon, so much bacon, sliced and stacked in packages that would have been a holy relic in some places. I trailed along beside him with my hands pushed into the pockets of my new jacket and my eyes as wide as they'd go. Get faster updates on novelping dot com.
A chapter from www.NovelPhoenix.com was reproduced without the author's consent, while reading there supports the writer.
And then we turned a corner, and there were the tables.
Small tables with white paper cloths, each with a person in a hairnet standing behind it. Each person was holding out little paper cups.
"Free samples," Clay said. "Go on. Don't look at me like that. They're free. That's the deal."
I took a cup. Inside were three tiny cubes of cheese on a toothpick. I ate them. They were sharp and creamy and salty, and I made a noise, and the woman in the hairnet smiled like I'd made her day.
The next table was a little square of pizza. The next was a sip of orange juice so bright and cold it hurt my teeth. The next was a bite of chicken in a sweet, sticky sauce, and the next was a single tortilla chip with green salsa on it, which made my eyes water and my nose run, and Clay laughed so hard he had to stop the cart.
"Too spicy?" he asked.
"I don't know," I gasped. "I can't tell if I like it or if it's attacking me."
"That's how you know you like it," Clay said.
The last table was a woman cutting pieces of a cake. Plain yellow cake, with white frosting. Nothing special. She handed one to me and one to a little boy standing next to me, maybe five years old, with a Canadian flag on his T-shirt. He took a bite and grinned at me with frosting all over his face, and I grinned back with frosting all over mine, and for one perfect moment everything in the world was a free piece of cake under a ceiling so high it might as well have been the sky.
I loved it. That was the moment I knew. Not that I'd chosen right, or that I'd never regret it. Just that I loved it, here, all of it. The noise and the light and the ridiculous ketchup and the people who'd drive across a border for toilet paper and a little boy covered in frosting.
I loved being alive.
* * *
We got back to the Broken Antler a little after ten, the truck bed loaded so heavily the back end sagged. Manny came out to help us unload, and we hauled box after box in through the kitchen door while the late-morning crowd filled the booths.
I was carrying a flat of eggs through the swinging door when I heard it.
"—right through the light on Ninety-three. Didn't even brake."
It was Dale, at the counter, talking to the man next to him. Both of them had their phones out.
"Who was it?" the other man asked.
"Gary. Gary Pell. You know Gary. Drives log truck for Haskell Lumber," Dale said.
The flat of eggs tipped in my hands. I caught it. Barely.
"Gary's fine. Banged up. Broke his collarbone. Walked away, basically." Dale shook his head. "But he T-boned a minivan. Mom and her two kids. The kids are okay, I think. Car seats. But she—" He stopped. He looked down at his phone. "She didn't make it."
I set the eggs down on the counter very, very carefully.
"Jesus," said the other man. "What happened? Was he drinking?"
"That's the weird part. Cops say no. Gary said he just felt great. Said he hadn't felt so good in years. Said he was driving home with the windows down, singing, and he looked down at the radio for one second—" Dale shrugged helplessly. "One second. That's all it takes."
Said he hadn't felt so good in years.
I didn't remember walking upstairs. I just remember sitting on the edge of my narrow bed with my hands clamped between my knees, staring at the cactus in its little cat pot on the windowsill.
Gary. Gary with his chicken-fried steak and his narrowed heart. Gary, who would have died. Not today, not tomorrow. But soon. Quietly. Maybe in his sleep, maybe in his kitchen. The way his body had been planning to all along.
And instead he'd been driving home, windows down, singing, because I'd touched his shoulder and given him back his heart.
And a woman I'd never met was dead, and her two children would grow up without her.
I could feel the shape of it. That was the worst part. Healers feel shapes. And I could feel this one, as clear as I'd ever felt a wound. A thread I'd pulled. And somewhere far away, out of sight, the cloth had shifted. A different thread had snapped.
If you pull every thread you love, Ithra had said, the cloth unravels.
I'd thought she meant it as a warning about disobedience. About rules.
She hadn't. She'd meant it literally.
* * *
Sari found me there an hour later. She knocked once and came in without waiting, and she took one look at my face and sat down next to me on the bed.
"You heard about Gary," she said.
I nodded.
"It's awful. That poor woman. And I know you like Gary." She put an arm around my shoulders. I let her. "He looked at his radio. That's all. Nobody could've done anything. It's just one of those things."
I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her so badly that my throat ached with it. It is my fault. He was supposed to die, and I didn't let him, and now someone else did instead. But the words wouldn't come. They were too big, and too strange, and if I said them out loud they'd be true.
So I just leaned my head against her shoulder, and I cried, and she let me, and she didn't ask.
Outside the window, over the old brick roofs, the mountains stood white and silent and very far away. Somewhere out on the highway, a whole carload of Canadians was driving home with a trunk full of paper towels and no idea that anything had changed.
I had loved being alive that morning.
It turned out that being alive was heavier than I'd thought.