Page 53 of Dear Henry, Love Edith
Edith held up a hand, bits of scone stuck to her fingers. “No need to apologize. We’re good. Honest. In a way, it was fun. Pretending. But that’s all it was, right?” She swiped her hands off with a napkin, then started backing out of the kitchen.
“Right.”No.He stood.
“I better pack and get over to Kat’s. I told Sharon I could fill in for the evening shift. So I should try to catch some sleep. See you around, Henry.”
“Sure.”Say something.“See you around.”Something better than that.
But she’d already fled up the stairs. Henry grabbed the kitchen island for support. Once he heard the bedroom door close upstairs, he bowed his head, no closer to finding the right words.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Seriously. How hard was it to find one poblano pepper? Edith pushed her cart down the produce aisle, past a stand of peaches, and sighed. Apparently hard. When one didn’t know what a poblano pepper looked like, Edith might go so far as to say it was very hard.
She sighed again—something she couldn’t seem to stop doing ever since moving out of Henry’s house a little over a week ago.
Henry.Edith smashed her lips inward before the thought of him provoked another sigh.Just focus on finding the pepper.
A wooden crate filled with bell peppers caught her eye. Now those she recognized. Green, red, yellow, yep, uh-huh, familiar. She had to be getting close. “Poblano, poblano...”Edith scanned the labels on the crates next to the bell peppers. “Aha. Finally.”
Last one too. She pulled it out of the container and held it in front of her face with a frown. Kind of small, wasn’t it? Maybe they had more in the back somewhere. Edith dropped the pepper into her cart.
Forget it. Last thing she wanted to do was talk to anybody. Not when her goal the rest of the summer was to lie low—a feat even more difficult to accomplish in this town than finding a poblano pepper. The sooner she got back to Kat’s house, the better.
Edith pushed her cart to the checkout lane. Why she thought she needed a cart for one pepper, she didn’t know. “Find everything okay?” the cashier asked.
Not really,but Edith kept that to herself and nodded as she handed him the pepper. The young man adjusted his glasses and turned the pepper over in his hand. “Um, do you happen to know what kind of pepper this is?”
“A poblano,” Edith said, digging into her purse for her wallet.
“Poblano? Oh no, honey, sorry to tell you, but that’s not a poblano pepper.” A middle-aged woman with a tight brown perm pushed her cart into the checkout lane behind Edith and held her hands up about half a foot apart. “A poblano is like this. That—” she pointed to the pepper in the checkout boy’s hands—“is a jalapeño.”
“It is?” Edith looked at the pepper, her cheeks warming. Surely she knew what a jalapeño looked like. “The label said it was a poblano.”
Perm Lady shook her head. “Oh no. No, no, no. Definitely a jalapeño.”
The checkout boy pushed his glasses further up his nose and squinted at the screen, mumbling to himself. “Oh. There it is.” He punched some buttons and$3.99appeared on a screen.
An older gray-haired man in the next checkout lane guffawed. “Three-ninety-nine?For one poblano pepper?”
“It’s not a poblano. It’s a jalapeño,” Perm Lady quickly corrected him.
“Either way, she ought to get a whole bag of peppers for three-ninety-nine. That’s highway robbery.”
Edith chewed on her lip. Three-ninety-ninewasan awful lot to pay for one little pepper. The checkout boy seemed to agree. He kept hitting more buttons.
“It’s too light to weigh.” Gabby appeared, wearing a name tag and a red polo shirt containing the grocery store’s name on the front. She continued speaking to the checkout boy as she bagged the older man’s groceries. “You’ll have to get the manager to punch in the special code.”
The manager? Great. Edith twisted her bangs. The line behind her grew longer.
“What’s the holdup?” a man with a bushy mustache asked.
“She’s paying three-ninety-nine for one poblano pepper,” the older man said.
“Jalapeño,”Perm Lady said with a huff.
“Sure it’s not a serrano?” Mustache Man said, craning his neck to see.
The checkout boy shrugged. “We can try that.” He punchedmore buttons. The price jumped to six-ninety-nine and everybody groaned, including the checkout clerk from the next aisle.
