Wanting Is Free

Suman shopped the way she did everything in public, which was carefully, and with her chin up, and as though money were a thing she had plenty of and simply chose not to waste.

She had a list. She had the flyer folded to the page that mattered. She had Tara in the cart seat, gnawing a mitten, and Kabir walking beside the cart with his hands behind his back like a small inspector, and she had, in her head, a number, and the number and the cart were in a slow quiet war that she intended to win without anyone watching her fight it.

They passed the coats.

There was a blue one. Wool, or the kind of soft that looks like wool, the colour of the sky in the ten minutes before the streetlights come on. It was on sale. It was still, even on sale, on the wrong side of the number.

Suman stopped. She looked at it the way you look at a window of a house you are not going to buy. She checked, without seeming to check, that no one was near. Then she took it off the rack and held it against herself in the little slice of mirror on the pillar, just for a second, just to see, and Kabir, who saw everything, saw that too.

Then she put it back, and squared it on the rack so it hung straight, and pushed the cart on, and her face did not change at all, because she was very good at this. It was the thing she was best at in the world.

“You wanted that,” said Kabir.

“I have a coat.”

“You wanted that one, though.”

“Wanting is free,” said Suman. “Bread is not. We’re here for bread.” And she moved them along, and that would have been the end of it, if Kabir had been a boy who let ends be ends.

He was helpful in the aisles. He was, in his own understanding, very helpful.

“We can’t get that,” he told a man reaching for the same cereal. “It’s not on the flyer this week. The flyer one is two down. It tastes the same. My mother checked.”

“Kabir.”

“He was going to waste money,” Kabir explained. “I stopped him. You’re welcome,” he added, to the man, who left quickly.

At the dairy he told a woman that the big milk was cheaper per litre but only worth it if you had four people, and did she have four people, because they had three and a half, counting Tara as a half, and so they got the medium. The woman said that was very good math. Kabir agreed that it was.

“Please,” said Suman, quietly. “Just walk. Hands behind your back and walk.”

“I’m helping.”

“I know,” she said, and she did know, that was the worst of it, “but help me by walking.”

They had almost made the tills. And then, by the seasonal aisle, they met Mrs. Bhatia.

Mrs. Bhatia was Aarav’s mother, and the Bhatias ran Prairie Tandoor, and were, in the small arithmetic of who was doing how well, a rung or two above the Gills and pleasant about it in a way that was worse than unpleasant. She had a full cart. She had a new coat, a real one, not blue but the kind of camel colour that costs what it costs.

“Suman! I didn’t know you shopped here.”

“Oh, sometimes,” said Suman, and her voice came out in the good register, the one she kept ready, warm and easy, a voice with plenty of money and simply choosing not to waste it. “For the odd thing. How are you. How is the restaurant.”

“Busy, busy, you know how it is. We’re driving to Calgary for the long weekend, Aarav has never seen the mountains, can you believe it.” Mrs. Bhatia smiled. “And you? Big plans?”

“We’re very well,” said Suman. “Very well, thank you.”

“My father is called Gary here,” Kabir offered.

Mrs. Bhatia looked down at him.

“At the store,” Kabir said. “His name is Gurmail but here everyone says Gary. He’s working right now, over at the far tills. We come on his days because he gets a discount. Ten percent. It’s why we can come at all, my mother says.” He said it brightly, the way you share good news. “There he is. He can’t wave. He’s not allowed to wave at us when he’s Gary.”

Across the store, at the far tills, Papa in his NordMart vest looked up, and saw his family by the seasonal aisle, and saw who they were standing with, and understood in one half-second the whole shape of what was happening, and could not leave his till, and lifted his hand a few inches off the belt, and put it down again.

“How nice,” said Mrs. Bhatia, “that he gets a discount.”

Suman’s chin was still up. The good register was still running. But something under it had started to give, the way ice gives, quietly, from underneath, while the top still looks like a road.

“Kabir,” she said. “Go and see if the medium milk was the last one.”

“I checked already. There were four left.”

“Go and check again.”

But it was already too late. Kabir had one more true thing in him, and it was the best one, the one he had been saving, and it was about the blue coat.