Helen Phillips - The Need

A woman with short dark hair turned the corner from the cereal aisle into the produce section.

Upon an additional instant of inspection: not Moll.

And yet.

Shaky with the ebbing alarm, Molly found herself missing David, missing him desperately, missing him as she had not missed him in a very long time, in years, perhaps. She needed him: the shape of his body, the balm of his irreverence.

But it was only Saturday morning; a week yet before he’d be back at her side. And she could not imagine anything—no wisecrack, no wisdom—he might offer that would neutralize the fact of Moll.

“You said juice,” Viv was reminding her in the distance. “You said juice,” Viv repeated, and her voice grew closer, louder. Ben was twisting against the safety belt of the grocery cart. Viv was pulling on her hand. “Hey, are there tiny cubes today?”

Brilliant , Molly thought; the cheese samples would absorb the kids while she finished the last bit of shopping for the party—the juice boxes, the rainbow sprinkles, the streamers, the other expenses and excesses of the exhausted mother. What a thing it was, grocery shopping, so tedious and so crucial.

She steered the cart toward the butcher section, Viv jogging alongside to keep up. It ashamed her how ardently she hoped the store was offering cheese samples today, and how glad she felt upon seeing the plastic pedestal, the ziggurat of cheese.

“Sword, please,” Viv said. She liked the toothpicks even more than the cheese. But as soon as Viv had a toothpick, Ben wanted one too. He reached and strained.

“It’s not safe for a baby,” Molly said.

“Yeah, sorry, B,” Viv said, relishing it, “it’s not safe for a baby to eat cheese off a sword.”

His face collapsed, his cheeks instantly covered in tears. It pained Molly how cute he looked when he cried.

“Viv,” she said. “Don’t gloat. That’s not nice. I guess neither of you should get a toothpick.”

“What’s gloat ?”

“Look,” Molly said to Ben. “I can’t give you a toothpick but what if instead”—she didn’t know what was going to follow, something compromising, some devil’s bargain—“I let you out of the cart?”

He stopped crying and smiled, knowing he had gotten the long end of the stick. She regretted her offer. But there was no going back.

She unbuckled him and lifted him out. Viv was on her third or maybe fourth piece of cheese.

“Viv, there are other people in the world, you can’t—”

Ben was already at the pedestal, using it to support his unsteady stance, stretching for cheese and toothpicks.

“Wait, Ben, stop—” She swooped him up and grabbed a handful of cheese cubes and shoved one into his mouth.

“Hey,” Viv said, “you got so many pieces for B, what about me?”

They could be dead. In another world, they were.

Molly grabbed a second handful of cheese from the display and distributed the cubes to the children.

“What’s this no?” Viv said, chewing cheese.

“What?” Molly was trying to catch the dribbles of cheese from Ben’s mouth before they hit the floor.

“What’s this NO ?” Viv was pointing at a sign on the glass case of the butchery. She had recently developed an obsession with No signs: No Smoking, No Pets, No Barbecuing. The Circle With The Line Through It.

Molly examined the sign. It depicted a woman with a shopping cart containing a baby. Beside the woman stood a child leaning against the glass of the butcher’s case. All enclosed within a circle, all crossed out with a line.

“It looks like us,” Viv observed.

She was right. It did.

“So, what’s it saying?” Viv said. “No us?”

“I think,” Molly said, gathering herself, trying to overcome the agitation the sign had set off in her, “it means Don’t Let Your Kid Lean On the Glass.” An explanation intended as much to comfort herself as to inform Viv. Of course they didn’t want kids leaning on the glass, leaving their fingerprints. It was a generic informational sign.

“You mean like leaning on the glass like the way how I’m doing right now?”

“Exactly.” Molly couldn’t believe how chipper her voice sounded. “So don’t.”

“Okay,” Viv said. “I won’t. But I want to keep looking at this sign.”

“But we have to finish the shopping,” Molly said. “Remember, the juice boxes? You can have one as soon as we pay for it.” She didn’t respect herself, her never-ending tactics and bribery.

“I love this sign,” Viv declared. “And it’s my birthday. And I want to stay right here. Looking at it. Forever.”

“We have to finish the shopping,” Molly said.

Some moments later, Viv was on the floor, kicking and slapping the linoleum. Her barrettes had fallen out. She was screaming, not words but syllables.

Molly took a step back, clinging to Ben, who clung to her. Other shoppers had begun to assemble, to witness. Molly felt hot and helpless. The witnesses murmured and muttered, trying to help.

“I’m sorry,” Molly kept saying to everyone, to the world as a whole. “I’m sorry.”

She wished she had methods for ushering Viv back into her tamed self. But she had never developed any methods. The beast within fought its way out while the mother watched in awe.

As the tantrum continued alongside Molly’s repeated apologies, the witnesses either lost interest or trained their increasingly judgmental eyes on the mother.

The employee’s name was CHARLEY, and she had a lollipop. She knelt down some feet away from Viv and held the lollipop out with caution, as one would offer a treat to a stray dog.

Viv—from her post flat on the floor—reached for the lollipop, the rope back to the grocery store, to civilization.

Molly was astonished. Charley tore off the wrapper. The witnesses dispersed.

“Charley,” Molly said. “Thank you.”

“Been there,” Charley said. She looked too young to be a mother.

“Just let me say goodbye to the No sign,” Viv said, queen of serenity. She licked her lollipop and stood too close to the glass case, petting the circle with the line through it. Ben wanted a toothpick, and Molly gave in, gave him one. He was pleased. He threw it on the floor.

Charley vanished. Molly tried to find her at the registers when they were checking out, but she didn’t see her anywhere.

In the parking lot the cars glowed in the weak sun, emitting a color of light that seemed to come from another world. Molly felt slow, drugged by fear and fatigue, moving as though through water. She was thankful that their car was still there, right where she had parked it. But what did she think anyway, that Moll was going to steal their car and leave them stranded at the grocery store?

It was not the car that Moll wanted.

Molly couldn’t go back home with the kids. Not yet. She wasn’t ready. She needed to clear her head. She needed to figure out how to keep them safe. Her milk was going to come down; she could feel the buildup, that heaviness.

She needed to take them somewhere to nurse and play—somewhere Moll would never think of, so somewhere Molly had never before thought of.

There was one ragged forsythia bush in the median, issuing forth a few crumpled yellow blossoms. Viv greeted the bush as though it were a lavish garden. The ground was mud and old grass, but they found a spot where they could spread the blue tarp from the back of the car and it would lie mainly on the latter. It was a grayish day, yet weirdly warm. Molly took off her sweatshirt and used it to soften the tarp for Ben. She lifted her T-shirt and unhooked her nursing bra and placed her body alongside his. While he took the milk, Viv orbited the forsythia bush, whispering to it, pretending its smallest branches were flutes.