A security guard nodded to Seth as the five of them approached. Only one register was open, and the line behind it was so long it snaked into one of the candlelit aisles. At the register stood a small crowd of store employees, including a man who was writing something on a pad of paper.
Blake stood behind them and finally spoke as Seth grabbed a shopping cart.
“Like I said, I don’t have much cash. Can I use some of what came from the golf course? Since we’re borrowing it?”
“Get what you need,” Seth said. “We’ll meet you back here in a few minutes and give you enough to cover your groceries. Within reason, of course.”
Additional candles had been placed halfway down each aisle, and Natalie could see the bread shelves were more than half empty. Seth scooped up eight or ten loaves, some white, some wheat.
“Natalie,” he said. “Why don’t you walk over to Produce and grab a few bags of potatoes and anything else that won’t spoil right away? I’ll get some sacks of rice and beans and we can meet back up in a minute.”
“What about milk?”
“We have no way to keep it cold. If I can find it, I’ll grab some dried milk. And pasta. Stuff like that. Whatever we can store without refrigeration.”
In the vegetable aisle, Natalie couldn’t find any sacks of potatoes. The entire Russet display had been ravaged. In a dark corner, though, she discovered Red Pontiacs and Yukon Golds in loose piles and filled a couple of plastic sacks with them. She grabbed carrots and onions. Some tomatoes and apples and a few pieces of squash. She didn’t even like squash, but it looked like something that wouldn’t go bad for a while.
Several other women were standing nearby, each collecting vegetables with shaking hands in near darkness. Natalie wondered what they must be thinking. She remembered the recent blizzard and how the Food Pyramid had quickly been depleted of bread and milk and eggs. As if, when you were snowed in, the only appropriate response was to cook mountains of French toast. In that situation it had been funny, watching overprotective mothers round up grocery staples as if twenty inches of snow really meant Armageddon.
Today it was not funny. Without TV or cell phones, there was no way to find out what had happened to the power, and what, if any, response was coming. Everyone was in the dark, literally and figuratively.
When she could carry no more plastic sacks of produce, Natalie walked back toward the store proper, looking for her family.
“Dad, I want Coke. I hate Pepsi!”
Natalie smiled. Only Brandon could find a way to complain about the end of the world.
“What difference does it make?” Seth replied. “The Pepsi is on sale. We need to get as many cans as we can.”
“I don’t want a lot of cans of Pepsi! I want less cans of Coke!”
“Brandon,” Natalie said as she approached with her vegetables. “Do you want Pepsi or do you want to drink water?”
“I want Coke!”
“So you’d rather drink water, is that what you’re saying?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s Pepsi or water. Your choice.”
“Fine. Make it Pepsi. Even though I hate it.”
She dropped her load of produce into the shopping cart, which was nearly full already. Potato chips, rice, beans, peanuts, cereal, two boxes of dried milk. They could have been preparing for a wagon trip to the frontier, except there was no wagon and no place to go.
“Is this enough?” she asked Seth. “Can we get in line now?”
“I think that ought to do it. This will get us by for a week or two, and surely by then there will be a relief plan in motion.”
“You think?”
“There are too many smart people and too much money at stake to let everything go to shit.”
Natalie appreciated Seth’s confidence, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what Thomas had written.
They found Blake beside a cooler at the front of the store. A couple of teenaged girls were standing nearby, handing out Styrofoam bowls of free ice cream. Before Natalie could stop them, each of her sons stepped forward and accepted a bowl. The Food Pyramid girls smiled and held out more bowls. For some reason Natalie felt like screaming at them. How could they stand there with retail smiles on their faces, doling out treats, at a time like this?
But instead of screaming, she looked over at Blake and tried to smile.
“Did you get enough food?”
“I don’t know how much is enough. But this ought to last me a week or so.”
Seth positioned himself at the end of the register line and motioned Blake to fall in behind him.
“This is gonna take forever,” Seth said.
At the front of the line, an elderly gentleman fidgeted as his cart of groceries was processed. For each item, the checker, a middle-aged woman with leathery skin and disheveled brown hair, called out the name of the product and its size. Next to her stood a lanky kid of about twenty, dressed in a black sweater and orange knit beanie, consulting a thick stack of printed pages.
“Prego spaghetti sauce, roasted garlic and herb, twenty-four ounces.”
The kid flipped through his list, a stack of pages so thick it must have numbered in the thousands, and finally called out a price, which he wrote down on a pad of ruled paper.
“Ronzoni Healthy Harvest whole wheat pasta, thin spaghetti. Twelve ounces.”
The kid went flipping again. He flipped and flipped.
Finally, he looked up and said, “No record.”
And that’s when a third store employee, a burly, balding fellow wearing a white oxford shirt and blue pants, stepped in.
“Max, we need a price check!”
A reedy, tanned kid with long, sandy blonde hair skipped off in the direction of the pasta aisle.
The elderly man, purchaser of the spaghetti, looked perturbed. The conveyor belt was crowded with groceries and he’d unloaded only half of what was in his cart.
Natalie counted ten people in line ahead of them.
“We’re gonna be here forever,” Brandon moaned.
They stood there waiting for the sandy-haired kid, who finally returned with a price. The checker processed two more items before running across another one that wasn’t on the list.
“Max, we need a price check!”
Ben groaned.
When all the man’s groceries were finished, he pulled a checkbook from his back pocket and requested a pen. The checker glared at him and said something Natalie couldn’t hear.
“Are you kidding? I always pay by check at this store! A check is the same as cash! Always has been!”
At that point another store employee walked over, thin and officious-looking. His moustache looked like gray wire and his beady eyes made Natalie wonder if he molested children in his spare time. He murmured something the elderly man didn’t like.
“I don’t care what the situation is! You should treat customers with respect, power or no power. I spend six hundred bucks a month in this store and always pay by check. Why should today be any different?”
The officious store employee murmured something else, and once again the elderly man took offense.
“I don’t give a crap about your computer system! I—”
The store employee said something else.
“There’s a bank branch not thirty feet away! Right over there by the deli counter. That’s where my money is. Go ask them.”
But when it became clear the officious employee would not relent, the elderly man grabbed his checkbook and marched toward the exit.
“You’ll be hearing from my attorney about this! I won’t stand to be humiliated!”