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same store he’d shopped in since he was in diapers.
    There was something to be said about shopping at the original Albertsons. He remembered when Old Joe Albertson, who had been one of Grampa Joe’s best friends, used to give him and his brothers penny candy right out of the bins.
    Fisher knew his way around the store with his eyes closed and even knew every cashier who worked there. At least there were some places where nothing much changed. He wished he could say the same about his life. He’d been in a bit of a funk lately.
    For a moment that morning when he’d asked Jessica out, he’d wondered if the root cause was lack of sex. It had been awhile since he had a date. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure why. She was the first woman he’d asked out in months, which was strange. Still, even though he crashed and burned in front of an audience of alert coffee drinkers no less, he couldn’t say he was in any more of a funk than he had been before.
    Fisher made his way to the produce aisle and grabbed the makings for a nice, healthy salad. Good food, strong body, strong mind, and all that. After tossing most of the produce aisle into his cart, he ran through the rest of the store looking for inspiration. Nothing looked good, but after the kind of day he’d had, it wasn’t surprising.
    He’d done back-to-back knee replacements on patients so obese, their joints deteriorated under their weight. After seeing what those poor people went through, he bypassed the frozen food aisle, looking at the shoppers who lived on chemically engineered, processed foodstuffs, and then did a double take when he recognized Jessica.
    Okay, it wasn’t her he recognized, but the shapely ass he’d followed that morning. The memory of it was branded on his psyche. Yeah, and he hadn’t exaggerated its perfection either. Jessica had her ass sticking out and her head buried in the frozen food case, while she tossed Lean Cuisine meals into her cart at an alarming rate.
    Fisher’s cart glided down the aisle as if it were self-propelled, while he checked out the rest of her cart. Two cases of diet cola sat on the bottom rack—hadn’t anyone ever told her the hazards of drinking that? The day he’d seen cola take the finish off an antique wood table was the last day he drank it. In the empty child seat beside her purse sat a loaf of processed white sandwich bread. He did his best not to gag. He almost failed when he saw the cereal beside it. She wasn’t buying cereal with colored marshmallows in it and a prize in the bottom of the box, was she? Maybe she had small children, but who would feed small children that? God, her cart looked like something that should be featured on a television show titled What Not to Eat . How could a woman in great shape survive on what she’d dumped in her cart? He didn’t see one fresh fruit or vegetable and nothing whatsoever from the dairy aisle. Of course, depending on the direction she was shopping, maybe she hadn’t hit it yet. One could only hope. “Hi.”
    Jessica jumped at his greeting. “What? Oh, it’s you.”
    Fisher leaned on his cart and checked her out—still amazed that her beautiful body could run on such low-quality fuel. “We meet again.”
    Jessica dumped a stack of chicken meals in her cart and looked him up and down. “Yeah, looks that way. I didn’t see you first.”
    She couldn’t fool him. Her words might say she was unhappy to see him, but her body language said different. Hell, from the fit of her T-shirt, she looked downright thrilled to see him, though that could just be from spending five minutes with her head and chest stuffed in a freezer case. Still, he wasn’t about to complain. “Do you actually eat all that?”
    She looked from her cart and back to him. “Yes. That’s why I’m buying it.”
    Fisher shook his head, tossed aside a few of the frozen meals, and picked up a jar of marshmallow spread that rested next to the peanut butter. “What are you,