Sweet Bye-Bye by Denise Michelle Harris Page B

the stolen nuts on the floor. They were too close for me to pass. I was trapped, and the kids continued to sing. I tried to wait for them to pass, but it had been a long day.
    “Umm, please excuse me,” I said. “I’d really like to get by.”
    The man with the children walked past the couple and made enough room for me to go around them. The couple looked so happy, just grinnin’ at each other and poking along. Standing close to each other and pushing their cart together. I looked at the pistachio thieves and rolled my eyes. Then I tisked at the man with his humming brats as they stomped their little feet on the metal bars below them like little marching drummer boys. It sounded like a miniature earthquake to me. I left the aisle glad that I wasn’t in either of those scenarios.
    Finally I got to the soap aisle and put a box of dishwashing powder in my basket. I needed to find the pet food area. I looked up at the signs that hung overhead. Three aisles down, 6B, pet food, pet collars, kitty litter. I thought about Mina Everett. I couldn’t stand her. I walked down the row and looked for pet cleanup products. The store had everything for animals. There were baby-powder-scented cleanup gloves and flea-repellent cat collars with colorful beads in them. There were special odor-neutralizing sprays and compounds. For $9.99 I found a poop-scooping gadget that looked like two claws coming together. I put it in my basket.
    My cell phone rang. I answered, “Hello, it’s Chantell Meyers.”
    “Hey, it’s me, Eric.”
    “Eric, what do you want?”
    “What are you doing?”
    “None of your business. Why don’t you go and call your little friend from the ship.” I hung up the phone. Did he really think that the world was supposed to cater to him? Be at his beck and call whenever he felt like playing cat and mouse? Put up with him even when he was blatantly misbehaving? All because he was beautiful. He thought wrong. If we were going to get back together, then he was going to have to learn this before we got married. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of stuff later.
    I remembered I needed more Apple Jacks, and oatmeal, and pushed my cart into the coffee and cereal aisle. My phone rang again. There were people standing around scanning the aisle. I walked past them, turned the phone on, put my hand over the receiver, and spoke quietly but sternly.
    “Hello!”
    “Chantell. Talk to me. How long are you going to stay mad at me?”
    I thought of how he disrespected me, and the hurt and anger resurfaced. No tears, Chantell, I told myself.
    “You know what? You need to get it together, Eric. I don’t have to deal with your mess, and I am not going to. Why don’t you stop calling me?”
    I hung up again and turned off the phone. I was trying to manage a lot. My head felt tingly and dizzy, and there was pressure behind my right eye. Between trying to keep an eye on my dad, work stressing me out, and Eric giving me the blues, I felt weak. I used to be anemic, really badly, and I remembered feeling this way. I wondered whether my iron count was low again. I held on to the cart and walked slowly.
    Last week I’d gotten my annual exam at my ob-gyn and they’d taken my blood at the lab. I could find out what was going on with me very easily. I reached in my purse and called the doctor’s number on the receipt in the envelope.
    “Hello, Dr. Lun’s and Dr. Parta’s office.”
    “Hi. My name is Chantell Meyers, and I was there last week.”
    “Yes, hello.”
    “I’m feeling dizzy, tingly, and having headaches, and I was wondering if my blood work came back.”
    “Blood work. Oh, sure. Hold on, please.”
    I put a box of granola bars in my cart.
    “Hi, are you calling about test results?” said a new voice on the other end.
    “Yes.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Chantell Meyers. I want to know if the results showed that I was anemic again, or if my blood pressure is up or something. I was anemic as a