All I Want (A Farmers' Market Story) Read Free

to stay, to notice how it was affecting people, and that shamed him too, deeply.
    There was paperwork to fill out. Alisha spoke in gentle, patient tones, so he nearly felt like he was back in kindergarten, complete with her escorting him back to his office.
    His office . His.
    “You’ll want to start notifying your clients,” Alisha said in that elementary school teacher voice. “Before they hear from anyone else.”
    Right. Work to do. Clients to notify so the company that was firing him—no, laying him off —didn’t lose any business. He would need to prepare everything to turn over to his replacement, whom he’d meet tomorrow. It didn’t matter that he’d been let go, there was still work to do.
    For the afternoon, he worked as diligently as he had the previous ten years. Making sure clients understood nothing would change, readying files and binders. He efficiently and methodically worked to make his job something he could simply hand over to someone else.
    It was a long day of continuous surrealism; none of it really sank in. Because he had a few weeks ahead of him, of training someone else to do his job. He had weeks of making sure things were “in order.”
    So, at the end of the day, when he shut his laptop down, he thought this would feel the same too.
    Instead he stared at the blank screen. His usual next step was to snap it shut, slide it into his briefcase, check his phone one last time for emails or messages and then walk out. Most Thursday nights he ate dinner with his parents. It wasn’t a day to stay late in the office, like he did every other night.
    But the IT Department had asked him to leave the computer so they could prep it for his replacement. He didn’t know how to walk away from this extension of himself that was going to be handed off to someone else.
    His replacement.
    He looked around the office that had been his for almost two years. He wasn’t a knickknack kind of guy. There were some awards on the wall, a picture of the Wainwrights from Lainey’s first birthday on his desk next to his Stan Musial–signed baseball.
    It would take him ten minutes tops to erase himself from this office, and he didn’t know what that said about him, or his job, or his life; he only knew it felt like it meant something —something not particularly good.
    * * *
    M EG PACED THE SIDEWALK outside the church trying very hard to breathe through the sobs that racked her body.
    She couldn’t hear what was happening inside, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She didn’t want the prayers or priest’s words telling her Grandma was in a better place. What better place was there than here —at Meg’s side?
    Meg tried to mop up her face, but she’d neglected to bring tissues, so she had only the collar of her dress and the backs of her hands. And she just kept crying, so it was a completely useless exercise anyway.
    She might not want to be in there, but she knew she should be. Grandma would want her in there, would consider it the right thing to do.
    But she also wouldn’t want a scene, and if Meg tried to get in a second time...
    The broken sob was impossible to swallow down. How could they turn her away from the funeral? How could they ban her? Grandma wouldn’t have wanted that. Grandma had always loved her.
    No matter what.
    Meg knew, in a way, this was her fault. She hadn’t planned well and the black sweater she figured she’d throw over her tattoos had boasted a giant hole in the armpit when she pulled it out of her closet.
    Meg had spent ten frantic moments pawing through her closet trying to find something acceptable to her parents that would also cover her arms and match and be suitable grieving colors and she’d just...given up.
    What was the point of scrambling through your closet when your grandmother was gone and your family was going to snub you anyway? To her parents, the tattoos were the visible slap in the face of all Meg had thrown away, all the shame she’d brought to their