I'll Fly, You Fry

The chef frowned.

She took the paper bags from my arms and carried them into the kitchen.

"Forgot the totes again. Huh?"

It wasn't a question so much as an indictment.

The reusable bags were right where I had left them: folded neatly and packed in another reusable tote, a nesting set that was waiting near the door to be brought to the car, where they would have stayed – stuffed in the trunk -- even as I tooled around the store with the one wonky-wheeled cart I'd managed to select from a line of perfectly functioning options.

I could tell her that a human being who has swum around in my gene pool it is more than likely she would rather pitch in five cents per bag than run out to the car to get them once she's in the store. …But that would have been cruel.

And risky.

Especially after she had so graciously volunteered to make dinner - a two-entree feast fit for a Super Bowl - and I had fumbled the ball. Again.

One by one, as she extracted the goods, she found enough evidence to convict.

"What's this nonsense? Chicken? From a can?"

She could not believe her eyes.

Her mother had taken the list she'd written by hand to the grocery store - and replaced each carefully curated ingredient with an imposter.

Canned chicken wasn't even the worst offender. Store brand hot sauce? Generic corn chips? What's next? Elbow macaroni in place of the twirly, whirly cavatappi? Gouda instead of Gruyère? 

Gru-where? Oh, rats! I knew I forgot something. 

She pulled out the box of elbows. “I even spelled C-A-V-A-T-A-P-P-I for you.”

“Honestly, I thought you had just mistakenly named some imaginary Franken-Pasta.” 

She had caught me. 

For a moment, I thought about pulling out the old supply-chain excuse. The pandemic-induced store-shelf gaps have made the old “They ran out” totally believable in almost all circumstances.

But I couldn't bring myself to lie.

The cat food aisle may have been sparse, but the pasta products were totally tubular.

"I'll be right back," I said with a sigh as I jammed my arms into my coat sleeves and search the pockets for car keys. "It's only the third time I've been to that store today, but I'm sure no one else is counting."

She tells me not to bother. She's already improvised her recipe from recollection and a cookbook framework once. She can improvise again.

But it's not really a bother.

I'd rather circle the globe in search of fancy cheese for an eternity than spend one more minute soaking up the silence brought forth by the nightly question: what do folks want for dinner?

"One of these days, I swear to dog, I will feed you crickets."

“Well if you're going back anyway, could you get real chicken this time? The kind I can cook myself? I feel like this canned stuff we should maybe feed to the cat.”