John Brandon - Citrus County

He waded into the morass, no idea which direction to go, and drifted toward a rack of sunglasses. He tried on a pair, made of electric blue plastic, like for water sports. They looked comical on Mr. Hibma. He didn’t return them to the rack. They helped with the low fluorescent haze. Mr. Hibma located a central cross-aisle and read the hanging signs. Perfume and T-shirts, almost given away. Candy. Baseball mitts. Mr. Hibma felt safe behind his sunglasses. They somehow put a buffer between himself and the fragmented warbling. These women were deciding which snack foods could be frozen, whether a certain blouse was purple or more of an eggplant, whose ex-husband was the most despicable, which purses matched which jackets, whether Bailey’s Irish Cream went bad. It was liquor, Bailey’s Irish Cream, but it was also dairy.

A lot of the women were nurses, and it made Mr. Hibma wonder if the nurse who’d kidnapped him had been one of these. Not all women became these. Maybe becoming one of these was what that nurse had been trying to escape. She wanted a two-person family out in the desert, down in the mountains in Mexico. The only chatter would’ve been the chalky, disarming trills of the birds. Probably not. Probably she was a nutcase, and not an interesting one. A regular old nutcase.

Congratulations. Condolences. Mr. Hibma slid farther up the aisle. His eye was caught by a card revealing the top half of an almost-nude woman. She looked like she was having fun. The woman was about Mr. Hibma’s age and a lot of care had been taken with her hairstyle. Her sexy birthday wishes were going to make Mr. Hibma feel a way he didn’t want to feel, so he quickly moved on, advancing sideways through plump nurses and very skinny ones. Apology — the smallest section, five cards in total. Mr. Hibma didn’t want to apologize. He wanted to reconcile, maybe. Not even that. He wanted to make a fresh start.

He slipped the cards out of their slots one by one, narrowed it to two. One of the finalists was adorned with perched doves, the other had a couple of cartoon Indians dropping their hatchets in a hole they’d dug. The two nurses next to Mr. Hibma were almost screaming at each other. To stem the tide of their voices, Mr. Hibma displayed the two cards in front of them and asked which they’d prefer to receive. They were his target audience, about the same as Mrs. Conner. They seemed not to notice his outlandish sunglasses.

“What’d you do wrong?” one of them asked.

“Nothing specific,” said Mr. Hibma. “I was being myself.”

“You should never apologize for being yourself. I learned that after I got divorced,” said the second woman. She had bags of flavored coffee clutched to her chest.

“Doesn’t that depend on what kind of self you have?” Mr. Hibma said. “What if your self has something wrong with it?”

“People don’t change. They try to but they can’t. That’s speaking from experience.”

“You’re probably right. I probably won’t change.”

“I hope not,” said the woman with the coffee. “I’m never going to change for anybody ever again.”

Toby rose early Saturday morning and dragged more supplies out to the bunker. He brought a dustpan and also another pillow, because Kaley had torn the stuffing out of her old one. He’d been keeping her for two months now. What, nine weeks? What did weeks and days matter? Toby didn’t want to keep track of time. It meant nothing. He went down and did what he had to do, thankful that Kaley was ignoring him this morning, then marched back to the house.

When he opened the front door, Uncle Neal was sitting in a chair staring at him. Odorless smoke hung about the room. Uncle Neal reached back and set his pipe down. His eyes were bloodshot and the corners of his mouth were sharp.

“Seen the nail clippers?” he asked.

“I have better things to do than keep track of your nail clippers,” Toby said.

“That’s a debatable claim,” said Uncle Neal. “Not that I care to debate it, but it’s a highly debatable claim.”

Toby took a step toward his room and Uncle Neal stood and asked if Toby was hungry. Toby looked at the table and saw slices of white bread with butter, some kind of meat patties, and peaches in a bowl. Uncle Neal never buttered Toby’s bread, but today he had. The meat patties were arranged so they were slightly overlapping, like in an advertisement.

“My breakfasts don’t suit you anymore, do they?” Uncle Neal said.

The food had no aroma. It was like the smoke.

“I’ll heat up a plate in a little while,” Toby said.

He again started toward his room and this time Uncle Neal stepped right in his path.

“I feed you for years,” Uncle Neal said. “All of a sudden you’re too fancy. All of a sudden I got to eat alone. You got some little girlfriend you’re always going and eating fancy with.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Toby said.

“Oh yeah? What do they call them these days if they don’t call them girlfriends?”

“You don’t need to worry about calling her anything. She’s never coming around here.”

Uncle Neal was still standing in front of Toby. He seemed engaged in the moment in a way that wasn’t usual. He still had his lighter in his hand and now he slipped it in his pocket.

“I know who she is,” he told Toby. “The girl whose sister got snatched. You got some sick fascination with her because her sister got snatched.”

“I’m not sick,” Toby said. “I’m just fine.”

“I used to think I was going to raise you.” Uncle Neal gripped Toby’s shoulder. Toby finally smelled something — Uncle Neal’s shirt. He’d been wearing the same clothes for days. “I used to think we could help each other.”

“Well, we can’t,” Toby said.

“I know what you’re doing, you little thief.”

It felt like Uncle Neal could’ve broken Toby’s shoulder. Toby tried to move. He said, “What am I doing?”

“You’re stealing from this house and selling the stuff at that rat-ass flea market. You’re a businessman, a little merchant. I brought up a boy who would rob his own flesh and blood. A little fucking capitalist.”

Toby didn’t feel like answering to this accusation. He had been stealing. It was a lot easier to get things from the house than to keep making extra trips to the grocery store or the drug store. And it was free. What could his uncle do about it?

“I’ll tolerate disrespect,” Uncle Neal said. “I’ll tolerate thinking you’re something special. I tolerate that stuff all the time. But there has to be a line, and I’m the one who has to draw it.”

Toby kept quiet. He felt each of his uncle’s fingertips digging into the bones of his shoulder. Uncle Neal hadn’t laid a hand on him in years — hadn’t pushed him around or even mussed his hair, hadn’t dug Toby in the ribs after making a joke, hadn’t slapped him on the back when he was coughing. Uncle Neal looked at his hand and flexed his fingers. He inhaled greedily.

“And I gave you a fucking allowance. That was my choice. That was my own poor rearing.”

Uncle Neal hit Toby then, a kind of open-handed punch. He rushed it and it didn’t land squarely. He hit Toby a second time. Toby wilted, but not out of pain. Uncle Neal seemed surprised that his blows were having an impact.

“I want it to hurt me more than it hurts you,” Uncle Neal said. “It doesn’t, though. It doesn’t hurt me.”

“It doesn’t really hurt me, either,” Toby said. He didn’t look up, but he had the feeling his uncle was staring at his own hand.

“I can’t be hurt anymore,” Uncle Neal said. “I’m that low.”

“You’re tough, is all,” Toby told him.

“I’m not even ashamed.”