Five Days in Summer

colors had given way to neutrals, her adolescent posters stripped away. Over the bed was one of Sarah’s paintings of Emily as a small girl, holding her father’s hand, which entered the picture just at the edge of the frame. Between the windows were two photos: Emily on stage at Carnegie Hall and Jonah with his first vintage car.
    Emily opened the bottom dresser drawer and remembered she was in the middle of laundry; most of their clothes were upstairs in the mudroom off the kitchen, churning away in the machine or waiting in a heap on the floor. She peeled off her bathing suit and put on the same underpants and khaki shorts she’d had on at lunch. Holding her blue shirt against her front, she went upstairs to the mudroom and looked through the unwashed piles for a bra. It seemed all her bras had gone in with the load of whites, which were currently mid-cycle. So that was it, she’d throw caution to the wind and go braless; if someone wanted to look, that was their problem. She slipped on her leather sandals and remembered her sunglasses before heading out the door.
    It was Labor Day and traffic was thick on Route 151 all the way to Stop & Shop. Emily abandoned the idea of the iced tea. By the time she got her turn at the green arrow at the intersection, directing her intothe shopping center, all sensation of escape had evaporated with the heat; she would get it over with and go home. She pulled their white Volvo wagon into the only spot she could find at the far end of the crowded lot. It looked as if everyone else who had seen the distant clouds had run to the store to beat the rain. She couldn’t see the clouds anywhere now; the sky was blue.
    She followed her usual routine in the store and went straight to the deli counter. They had a nifty new computer, as an alternative to the long line, and she touch-screened in her order. She’d get just enough of her mother’s favorite cold cuts and sliced cheeses to take her through the rest of the week alone. Sarah always stayed on the Cape through the end of September before returning to her own apartment in Manhattan, and Emily had urged her to follow her normal schedule even though Jonah was gone. The deli’s computer screen spit out a receipt, instructing Emily to arrive at the pickup counter in twenty minutes.
    Turning into the vegetable aisle, she impulsively decided on corn for dinner with their grilled salmon. She pulled up at the bin of fresh corn and waited for a man who was carefully filling his bag. He seemed to touch every ear of corn, even if just slightly, as if performing some kind of ritual. She had never seen anything like it. He appeared to be in his fifties and had pasty skin to match his white hair. A navy blue sailor’s cap that didn’t fit well sat on top of his head. He wore a white windbreaker, the only person in the whole store outside of the butcher department wearing a jacket on this hot summer day. When finally she turned away to get some red peppers and stop wasting time, he curtly spoke.
    “That’s it. I’m done.”
    His eyes flicked at her chest, then her face, then the corn. Emily’sbravado at going braless vanished in that instant. He touched three more ears of corn, then carefully placed his bag in his shopping cart and moved away. Back at home in Manhattan, she would have steeled herself in the gaze of another shopper and muttered, “Only in New York” with a shared laugh. But here on the Cape, in this crowded exurban store, she was alone, and this guy was weird in a most uninteresting way.
    It took shucking a dozen ears of corn before she found six good ones, and by then, to her relief, the strange man was long gone. She pushed her way through the aisles. Extra tuna and peanut butter for sandwiches on the ride home tomorrow. Goldfish crackers for Maxi’s snacks and entertainment. Those awful fruit rollups the boys loved so much. Juice boxes. Small water bottles. An extra can of Sarah’s favorite loose tea, just in case she was running low.
    Emily turned into the bread aisle in search of her mother’s favorite loaf, and there he was, right in front of her: the corn man, slowly pushing his cart along with his eyes fixed forward. She moved straight past him and couldn’t tell whether he had seen her. At the end of the aisle she found the bread she wanted with a sense of relief that was all out of proportion.
    “Didn’t you realize it was gone?”
    An older woman with bleached blond hair and too much makeup stood next