Anna set her groceries down on the sidewalk first, and then let herself thump down on the bench. She swept the back of one hand across her eyes. Then she leaned back and crossed her ankles in front of her.
Anna Eleanor, she told herself, it’s a food thing your parents aren’t around to see you now. They named you after that First Lady so you’d grow up to be the first lady president.
She shook her hair out behind her; maybe she’d just sit here until it was mostly dry again. It was one of the nice things about unemployment: no need to hurry anywhere.
Without any real warning, the city had up and eliminated her entire department, director to receptionist. Never mind that no one else in the government had the expertise, the experience, or the connections to fill in for the missing employees. Getting the job done was not important in an election year: the point was to eliminate expensive workers and cut the deficit.
Well, she’d be all right. Things might get tight, but there’d be another job once the voting was done. She had her bank account to keep her warm. Rent, electricity, and telephone could be covered for about a year. And if she restricted expensive cuts of meat (anything not ground up) tpo her birthday and holidays, there should be no problem at all.
She glanced at the bags. Why, right here she had a week’s supply of Ramen and tubes of off-brand biscuits, six for a dollar. There was rice, pasta, and, as a special treat, a can of pork and beans. Between rice and Creamettes, that can could probably be stretched to two or three meals. But maybe she wouldn’t stretch it. You needed something extravagant for at least one meal, to keep up morale.
What to choose for supper tonight? Which of these wild treats…. Never mind, Anna Eleanor, she told herself, letting the scowl smooth from her face. Just lean back and let your hair dry. Important to keep a cool head.
Head tipped back, she didn’t see Shannon coming along the concrete. Shannon had seen her, but was paying no attention. His mind was busily working out how Chris pointing out mathematical errors in his work meant, really, that Chris was after his job. The problem was that, the way his brain worked, this had easily moved to Chris leading police to his apartment with a search warrant to make sure Shannon wasn’t smuggling office supplies out at the end of the work day.
Shannon shook his head. Had to break that habit. With little or no provocation, he could build a chance encounter with a stranger into a robbery at the grocery store, with himself as the hero, ripping the head off the stranger with the useless gun. He could as easily develop a story that began with his own arrest for jaywalking by the stranger with the hidden badge and ended with suicide in prison, a place he imagined was not ideal for a convict named Shannon.
He glanced up. Maybe it was the weather. A thunderstorm was on the way: his animal senses told him so. Those same animal instincts had convinced him to leave early today., claiming he was sick. He WAS sick. Sometimes it got so crowded in there that a man with such a highly developed animal nature couldn’t breathe. There were more people in the department every day: one day they’d discover there wasn’t enough work for them all and start trimming the dead wood. Chris would see to it that highly sensitive animal men who left work early would be the first to go.
He checked the clouds again; his nostrils told him the storm was nigh. It would be a nasty one, too. He’d have to double bolt the doors when he got home, so the lightning didn’t force him outdoors once the transformation had taken place.
While eyes were pointed up, a bag of groceries which had been sitting quietly, minding its own business, tipped forward. Flat packages of Ramen noodles rattled across the sidewalk, and a can of pork and beans rolled toward Shannon’s feet.
Halfway there, it seemed to catch on a crack in the concrete and roll on into the grass, bumping aside a can of mandarin oranges. This bounced a cylinder of cheap biscuits toward him.
“Oh, prunes!” The woman on the bench bent forward to gather in the noodle packages. Shannon, bending automatically, paid more attention to the biscuits than to their owner. He took a step back when he did see her. The clear complexion and bland face repelled him at once. She would have a particularly cruel smile. Women with cheeks like that always did.
He stood with the can of biscuits clutched in his hands. Now what? He didn’t want to have to talk to her, but he wasn’t going to walk away with her biscuits. She’d scream for the [police—he knew she would—and with that jaywalking charge already on his record…no, wait. That hadn’t happened, had it.
Anna looked up at the young man frowning at her biscuits. The sidewalk here was very dirty, of course: nice of him to check whether the tin had broken at the Easy-Open Seam. Most men his age would never think of things like that.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” she told him. “I don’t know what made everything fall all out that way.” Anna stood the bag up and piled the noodles inside, and then twisted it toward him so he could drop in the biscuits.
Shannon hesitated for a long time, and then sat down on the bench to slide the cylinder into the opening. “Is….” He had to lick his lips to go on. “Is that all there is?”
“I think so.”
The woman bent farther over the bag, presenting the back of her head to him. Shannon shuddered and turned away, checking the grass. “Oh! Here’s some oranges!”
Shoving his hand down to pick up the can, he rammed his thumb against the rim of another, heavily concealed by bending grass. With his luck, this can was old and rusty, and he’d die now of tetanus. With one thumb in his mouth, he brushed back grass with the other and spotted the familiar, not at all dirty, label of a can of pork and beans.
Anna, still rearranging things in the bag, exclaimed, “Oh, thank you!” He WAS a thoughtful young man. Poor fellow: anyone looking at him could see there was no one to think of HIM. His haircut was very bad, and the cuffs of that dress shirt were frayed to the point of dilapidation. He smelled far too strongly of Ivory, too.
She pushed the mandarin oranges down among the other groceries. “That bag’s just about full,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a sure sign,” she said, giving the groceries another shift. He was very young. She shrugged. Not everybody could be the right generation: he looked like one of those boys who always assumed an electric guitar and a stage would be their destiny, only to wind up working in an office. He just hadn’t learned yet how to fit into the civilized world. The civilized world had a way of teaching you, though.
Shannon held his breath until she sat back again. Then he saw her eyes go to his hands.
“Here’s another.” Keeping his eyes on her at all times, he set the pork and beans can on top of the other groceries. He could feel himself turning red, seeing in her eyes she thought he’d planned to steal her beans. Her face showed how superior she felt to the rest of the world. She looked the perfect image of his third grade teacher, the one with the paddle, who liked to hear little boyus scream. (His mother told him what he had seen was a clipboard. All these women worked together.) Twenty years gone, and he could still see those cruel eyes, and hear her voice saying, “Hush, Shannon. You’re making a show of yourself.”
Maybe it was time to make a show of himself. He’d been quiet, restraining his wolf persona for so long. Maybe the time had come to lope under the full moon, to let the werewolf slake its thirst in its victims’ blood. She could be the first.
“Well, now. What’s the problem here?”
Perhaps the cans were too heavy for the noodles to support: in any case, the bag tipped again before either pair of hands could stop it. The can of beans, particularly, was active, seeming to jump and roll for the street. Shannon went after it, but his left foot found the can of mandarin oranges. Flailing with the recaptured beans, he just missed slamming the can between her eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked him. He took a few seconds to sit square on the bench again: Anna hoped he hadn’t twisted an ankle. He didn’t answer. Of course not: no man would admit he was hurt. His face was just like Colly, who had started as her doctor at that clinic in California, only to substitute himself for her other addictions and wind up addicted himself. He’d jumped in front of a train. She closed her eyes for a moment.
The young man rose and she opened her eyes to see him walk, without any sign of a limp, toward the packages of noodles, which had managed to fall in the shape of a little hut, with rwo walls and a roof. He touched the roof and the walls fell in, making him jump back.
“Bug,” he growled, sitting down again. “Bit my leg.”
She studied him as he bent farther forward to retrieve some more Ramen. “You know that’s the way trouble starts, Anna Eleanor,” she told herself. But her life was probably as full of trouble now as it could get, and he did seem to be built pretty much along the lines of Dr. Colly. From what she could see at this angle.
She had attracted a lot of attention from young and slow-moving types like this young man, after she deteriorated to California from dancing in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas it had been older men and some very nice suppers, and plenty of money for artificial life sweeteners. California’s men, not often as soft-spoken as this specimen, didn’t offer supper. And eventually one had to admit one wasn’t up to scandalous scanties on the stage and become an aging city employee. They talked about rehab these days as if it was like having the flu, but in those days it had been one step above…. An aging city employee. Former city employee.
“Where’d those biscuits go now?” the young man growled, showing himself to be intriguingly limber as he nearly stuck his head right under the bench to look.
Anna shrugged. Once you got old enough that nobody cared what you did, nobody cared to do it with you.
Shannon spotted the wretched biscuits, just beyond the reach of his fingers. Every time he even brushed it with his fingers it rolled back another half inch. He was getting confused: was he going to hit the old woman with the biscuits or hit the biscuits with the old woman? Which was making him madder?
He glanced back at her. Her expression was intent; she was plotting something. His third grade teacher had worn just that face when she put the curse on him, extending his suffering outside her classroom, so he would undergo the transformation every full moon. “I can hear you howl, even when we’re far apart,” was what she’d been thinking, on that last day of third grade, even though all she’d SAID was “Have a good summer.”
Ah! His fingers curled around the biscuit cylinder. Just at that moment, it somehow slid sideways. Shannon extended further, and found himself at the very end of the bench and about to fall facefirst in the scraggly grass. He was shifting his feet when he felt a tug on his belt. This startled him into a leap. He sat down hard on the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry,” said the old witch. “I thought I could hang on.”
Likely story, Shannon thought, but even as he growled his displeasure, his manners slipped in to gloss over the wolf, as usual. “Oh, that’s just what WOULD happen, with my luck. Someone put a curse on those biscuits.”
“I know what you mean.” She extended a hand, which he ignored. “Once your luck starts downhill, it keeps going, and faster.”
“True.” Shannon put a hand down to push himself up and squashed a box of Jell-0 pudding. “Drat!”
Anna Eleanor rolled her eyes, thinking, “And such manners! Would you have said ‘drat’ when you were his age, Anna Eleanor?” She leaned forward to peer at the box. “I don’t think you broke it.”
“I hope not.” Shannon checked the crumpled box. “Shame to waste the tapioca.”
“That’s for my birthday,” she said. “It’s always been my favorite.”
The box wasn’t leaking as Shannon picked it up. “I always loaded up at the college cafeteria. Especially when they put the pudding from the night before out at breakfast. It was good and thick by then.”
“The wonder is how it makes such a thick pudding and such a thin meatloaf.”
Shannon, his eyes wide, looked up from the grocery bag, his hand poised above it. “Oh, you don’t add the pudding,” she assured him. “Just loose tapioca.”
“I know that.” His eyes were still bulging. “I just never met anyone outside my own family who made that.”
“Really?” She sat back. “Me neither. You’d think we both came to the park through the Psychic Pals Congregation.”
“An accident of fate.” He put the pudding into the bag.
Her head tipped to the side. “Can you have an accident of fate? If something’s fated, can there be an accident?”
Shannon’s lips tightened; she was correcting him. Just as well. If they’d gone on discussing food they had in common, he might have found himself liking someone he hated. That was fate, surely: the first woman he’d found who could talk about useful things, like tapioca, and she was the utter opposite of his ideal. He’d been looking all this time for a short, slender young thing with big eyes and wispy hair across the back of her neck, and what he found to talk to was an old schoolteacher, half a witch. That was why he was still even here, probably: she’d put a spell on him.
“When they came out with chocolate tapioca pudding, I tried that,” she chattered on pretending not to notice he’d been frozen to the grass by black magic. “Waste of time. Gilding the lily.”
Shannon’s agreement was out before he could stop it. “Some people put cherry pie filling on top. Makes you wonder why people who hate tapioca pudding don’t just eat something else.”
An intelligent boy, she thought: a bright boy. She hadn’t found anyone who’d talk this way since Dr. Colly. The folks at the store used to talk food, but nowadays they’d hire anybody who’d run a box across a scanner for minimum wage. Only the butcher was required to know anything, and she couldn’t afford to hang around his counter these days. Oh, Anna Eleanor, couldn’t you be a dozen years younger? Of course, you’d probably be named Jacqueline.
“I know what you mean,” she told him. “It’s like all those people who can’t cook rhubarb without adding strawberries or marshmallows or something.”
His mouth flopped open again. “Rhubarb! I can’t find rhubarb to buy anywhere! Unless that’s what’s growing in the planters at Booty Burger. I keep thinking I should cut some and find out. But if I make a poison pie, that’s just wasting the lard for the crust.”
“Only lard for pie crust.” Anna sat back. It was years ago, of course, when a young man who knew anything about baking was considered uninterested in women, but nowadays…. Oh, Anna Eleanor what difference does it make? Whether he’s interested in men, women, or cabbages, it’s nothing to do with you.
“Easier to just make the pudding.” Her head bent over the bag of groceries, checking the arrangement.
“If it is rhubarb, it’s just going to waste,” he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the brger joint. “I could make the pie and the pudding, and have both on the same day.”
“That would be a red-letter day.”
Shannon studied the back of her head. She had no idea how red this red-letter day would be. Her cunning in keeping him here would backfire. He would just hold her in conversation as well, until he decided where to start.
“What would you pick for the main course? Or is two desserts enough?”
“I don’t think they’d go together.” Distracted, Shannon considered the question. “Pizza? Fried chicken? Steak? I don’t know. With those to follow, I could make do with a Booty Deluxe.”
“Any of that sounds good.” She patted her groceries.
She did seem a nice person…for a wicked witch and torturer of small children. But this was not enough to defeat his wolf nature. Whatever she said, she had to face retribution. He would have hius revenge on his third grade teacher, since if she wasn’t dead by now, she must surely be immortal, and thus as untouchable as always. This witch would be her reprsentative. He would play her body like a drum, rising in bloody crescendo.
He turned wolf eyes to look for a weapon. None of the big cans was within reach, but perhaps he could offer to haul her groceries for her. Or maybe his hands would do. The old lady looked tough, but the wolf was tougher. If he could keep an eye on her until dusk, the wolf would take charge.
“I can’t remember the last supper I didn’t make myself.” She shifted the cans below the Ramen and pudding, probably reading his mind about the heavy can of beans.
Shannon leaned in. “Sometimes I make my own supper.” Tonight, he did not add, I’ll be feasting on your life’s blood, spurting from your torn throat.
“Tiresome, cooking for one.”
“Supper usually takes about ten minutes.” Now. Right now. Before she could say anything more to his human side. Time to act. Be like the wolf: make your decision and act on it. He rose from the ground, a looming shadow.
Oh, he was so tall. Anna sighed. “Well, I’d best be going, too. Thanks for helping.”
Taking the handles, she rose, turning her back on her helper. Forget him, Anna Eleanor: you were a fool even trying. That line about cooking for one was old and musty. He’s no more interested in you than he is in this can of pork and beans. He was just a polite young man; he’d have done the same thing for his grandmother.
Shannon studied her neck, picking a place to take hold. He and his chosen victim were both too deep in thought to realize one can of mandarin oranges was still lurking in a clump of weeds. One of Anna’s footsteps must have shifted the plants enough for it to roll onto the sidewalk.
“Wowp!”
Arms flailing, her groceries bouncing everywhere, she went flopping backward. Shannon, reaching for her neck, could not get his arms out of the way before she fell into them. He staggered backward under the soft, warm weight. She smelled of some exotic scent which made him think, for some reason, of pink bathrooms with ruffled curtains.
She turned her head up, her hair tickling the underside of his chin. “Well, you’re just being helpful all over the place!” She thumped one fist softly against his chest. “Lucky thing you keep your muscles so hard. I’m heavier than a bag of pudding.”
Shannon had no idea what to do now. Now that he had her in his clutches, and could easily hurl her to the sidewalk to rip off her arms and legs, that all seemed kind of drastic. That she should throw herself into this fatal trap was unexpected; that she should pay him a compliment while she was there stunned him.
“Well.” He fought to bring back the wolf. He wanted to growl “With luck you won’t find out how hard” but it occurred to him that this wording could be misconstrued. But that was good, wasn’t it? If he really offended her, she might show her true nature.
Anna was in no hurry to extricate herself, but she could see no future in this conversation. Pulling herself upright, she bent over to snatch up the mandarin oranges and grab at the disobedient bag nearest her. It was not an accident that she did not step forward, so that she rubbed against him as she worked.
She hoped she was smiling and not leering. “Why not come with me so I could make you something to eat?”
Shannon shivered. Something about that maternal smile was sapping his wolf strength; he almost said he would come. He looked vainly into the sky for a full moon.
She went on smiling. He forced his mind back to his third grade teacher, and her smile as she waved goodbye at the end of that hideous year. Fake smile, fake smile, as if he didn’t know that as soon as he was out of sight she would put the mark of the wolf on him.
And he still couldn’t think of her name. Maybe it had been his SECOND grade teacher.
“It would be a supper you don’t have to buy,” she told him. “And you could…..” No, Anna Eleanor: he’s the timid sort. That line about bringing you breakfast will scare him away. And isn’t all that original.
“I….”
“I bet you’d like something that lasted more than ten minutes.” Anna Eleanor you are completely out of your tree! She caught up more of the groceries. What are you going to feed him, anyhow? Maybe…well, no, maybe NOT the pork and beans.
“Well, I….” She studied her smile. Her mind was too devious for a simple wolf; he couldn’t read what she was planning. “I could…I’d…have to…leave early. I…I can be…dangerous after dark.:
“I look forward to it.” She smiled into his eyes, and set the first bag on the bench, so he could pick it up, which would leave her a hand free to take his. This hand was good and solid, too, if a little damp. And suddenly he didn’t smell nearly so much of ivory.
He pulled back, his eyes narrowing. “How can I remember you already? We just met.”
‘Remember you?” she demanded at the same time. “You never lived in California, did you?”
They stared at each other, laughed, and set off down the sidewalk.
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