Aisle Seven
“Mom, Max put a cucumber in his pocket,” Sophie said.
“It’s for later!” my five-year-old protested.
“Put it back, honey. We have a cart.”
Max looked at me with his big brown eyes. Then he looked at the cart. Then he pulled a whole English cucumber, wrapped in plastic, out of the front pocket of his hoodie. Half of it had been sticking out the top the whole time.
He laid it in the cart very gently, next to the bananas, like he was putting a baby down for a nap.
“I was saving it,” he said.
“I know you were, buddy.”
It was Saturday, and I’d brought all three kids shopping.
That’s not something I’d recommend. Not at the Meijer on 28th Street in Grand Rapids at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning, when every family in Kent County is there buying the same gallon of milk. But it was my weekend. Brian had them every other weekend, and this wasn’t his.
So there I was. Sophie, eight, walking beside the cart with her hand on the side of it, the way she always does, like she’s helping steer. Max, five, wandering off every thirty seconds to look at something. And Rosie, two, in the cart seat, chewing on the strap of my purse.
Three kids. One cart. One mom.
Brian and I had divorced ten months earlier.
It was final on a Tuesday in January. Kent County Circuit Court, Family Division. Twenty-two minutes in a courtroom on the fifth floor. Joint legal custody. I got primary physical custody. Brian got every other weekend and Wednesday dinners. Child support of eleven hundred and forty dollars a month, calculated by the Michigan formula.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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