Magnolia Wednesdays by Wendy Wax Page A

some hired chauffeur. She searched for another safe topic.
    “Aunt Vivi called. She’s going to come stay with us for a while. She said she wanted to spend some time with you and Trip.”
    This did, in fact, capture Shelby’s attention. She turned to face Melanie. “She always acts like she can’t wait to get away from here. What’s the point of going somewhere that you can’t wait to leave?”
    This was a good question, especially since Melanie was fairly certain Vivien had shattered some land and speed records bailing out on them after J.J.’s funeral, something Melanie had been too numb to fully process at the time.
    “Well, I’m sure it’ll be nice to have her around.” Melanie said this without any certainty whatsoever.
    “Right.” Shelby gave her the look she’d been perfecting for some time now. The one that said her mother was a complete and utter moron. “Like she ever cared about any of us.”
    As she pulled to a stop in front of the tutor’s house, Melanie whipped her checkbook from her purse and began to fill it in, her efforts centered on not thinking about her sister’s reappearance, her daughter’s hostility, or the amount of money that flew out of their bank account on a weekly basis. “Here.” She handed the check to Shelby, then watched her daughter climb out of the minivan with a big splash of thigh. “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” Which she sincerely hoped would be enough time to get to the grocery store, stock up, check out, and get back to the tutor’s.
    Inching down Johnson Ferry Road toward the Publix Super Market, she called home to make sure Trip was actually there.
    “How was your day?” she asked after his mumbled greeting.
    “Fine.”
    “Good.”
    There was a long pause. Melanie sighed and checked her rearview mirror before forcing her way into the other lane. She ignored the horns that blared in protest. She knew just how pissed off the woman behind her probably was at losing an entire car length, but she simply didn’t have the time to poke along right now. “I’m going to pick up some groceries and a frozen pizza for dinner. Will you preheat the oven to four hundred in thirty minutes?”
    “Okay.”
    “And set the table?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Are you sure you’re all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    This was the extent of her conversations with Trip these days. He wasn’t hostile like Shelby, didn’t act out; he just didn’t seem to have much to say to her. Or anyone else for that matter. Even the psychologist she’d taken him to in the months after J.J.’s death had admitted he’d been largely unable to get her son to speak.
    Once inside the grocery store, Melanie raced through the aisles, tossing things into her cart, nodding to acquaintances—also mostly working moms—the full-time stay-at-homes having presumably wheeled through the aisles at a more leisurely pace earlier in the day.
    In the checkout line she tried to understand why after all these years of grocery shopping she could not assess the quickest line. She’d avoided the checkout people that she knew moved too slowly, sidestepped the apparently single father who’d just started unloading a cart overflowing with microwave dinners, high-sugar cereals, and a stunning assortment of junk food, and passed by the elderly woman who was studying a debit card she apparently had no earthly idea how to use. Yet she’d ended up stuck behind an off-duty employee who’d brought in her newborn so that every other employee within a mile radius could come coo over it.
    Finally she was out of there and speed-pushing the cart through the parking lot where she was almost mowed down by other women with the same grim focused looks on their faces that she knew must be on hers. She was five minutes late to the tutor’s and arrived to find Shelby out on the driveway.
    Shelby spent the six-minute ride home texting. Her thumbs flew over the tiny keyboard, her gaze fixed to the tiny screen that had become her