A girl from church, Winnie Vice, entered the toy aisle from the other end with her toddler in the cart. Winnie was a Crystal or Brenda relative, she couldn’t remember which. That was another snafu at church: now that Crystal’s kids were blackballed from Sunday school, she brought them to the café, so forget about sneaking in there for quiet time—the place was bedlam. Other mothers of the out-of-control were lining up behind Crystal, hanging out together while their young were trained by Jazon and Mical in the art of using the juice machine as a spray gun. The congregation was definitely dividing into pro-Crystal or pro-Brenda factions, and it was hard to guess what might compromise your neutrality. Winnie hadn’t seen her, so she could make a clean break if she got out of the toy aisle. Still toyless. Dellarobia grabbed a horribly made plush raccoon that didn’t even look like a raccoon, and threw it in her cart because it only cost a dollar. She wanted to punch somebody out. The world made you do this.

Food, here at least was something sensible to buy. She loaded up on two-dollar boxes of mac and cheese, and picked through the cereal looking for those with fewer marshmallow-caliber ingredients. Down the aisle she spied Cub standing near the coffee, and there was Crystal Estep, good night. With her boys nowhere in evidence, Crystal was all smiles, beaming up at Cub’s great height, leaning against her cart in a backward tilt that threw her pelvis forward like a kindergartner doing stretching exercises. Crystal spotted Dellarobia, waved at her, and shoved off, leaving Cub to peruse the coffee. Dellarobia steered toward her husband, vowing to try and be sweet, but of course he picked up the can of Folgers. “Put it back, Cub,” she said. “Get the store brand.”

“I thought we liked the Folgers.”

“Six dollars. The store brand is one seventy-five. Which one do we like?”

They arrived together at the Last Chance section at the end of the aisle, ridiculously low-priced items that had gone past their expiration dates. She got a canister of lemonade mix and some fruit cocktail. Who knew canned fruit could expire?

“How’s Miss Crystal?” she asked.

“Motormouth, like always,” Cub said. “Somebody needs to adjust her idle.”

Dellarobia laughed. “That’s not nice.”

“She says she wants you to look at her letter she’s writing to Dear Abby.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Again? You should see that thing, it’s like twenty pages long. She ought to apply some of that stick-to-itiveness to getting her GED.”

Dellarobia was amazed to see what wound up in the Last Chance section, not just food but also strange hair products and such. Packs of gum. And a packet of condoms! Who in their right mind would buy expired condoms? she wondered. It seemed like the very definition of a bad bargain. Cub naturally went for the hot-fudge-sundae toaster pastries, which she wanted to snatch from his hand and smack against his big belly. But she decided not to add Cub’s weight issues into today’s fun lineup. If she could pretend ice-cream-flavored breakfast snacks did not cause obesity, he might overlook the less advantageous aspects of lung cancer.

“Hey, buddy! Who’s this pretty little lady?” A tall, narrow man in a raincoat and old-fashioned fedora reached across their shopping cart, evil swan and all, to shake Cub’s hand. Cub introduced her to Greg, his supervisor at the gravel company.

“So what do you think?” Greg winked at her. “Is it time to start building an ark?”

Ha-ha-ha-ha. Dellarobia was ready for her world to get some new material. Cub chatted with him about how busy they’d been at work. She wondered why the boss would be shopping at the dollar store. Sometimes it seemed nobody at all had any money. But he was management, wasn’t there maybe a small step up? A two-dollar store? She hung around long enough to seem polite before waggling her fingers good-bye and pushing on. Cub caught up to her in the dog food aisle.

“Mother and Dad feed the dogs,” he said.

“Roy spends half his life at our house, in case you didn’t notice. When I bummed some Purina off Hester last time, she let me know her feelings. So we need dog food.”

Cub studied the offerings and obediently hefted the store brand from the bottom shelf, priced at $4 for the fifteen-pound bag, undoubtedly made of garbage. Rather than the $10 name-brand bag placed at eye level. Cub had retained the lesson from the coffee aisle, she appreciated that, but she felt terrible skimping on Roy. He was a perfect dog, he didn’t deserve poverty rations. He should apply for a position in a better household.

“So that’s your boss,” she said.

“Yep, that’s Greg. Large and in charge.”

“You could take him,” Dellarobia said. “Blindfolded. I’d put money on you.”

Cub smiled. “Here’s what you need for Christmas.” He held up a ceramic mug that read, “Out of My Mind, Back in Five Minutes.”

She grinned back. Maybe this fight was over. Maybe they’d even have make-up sex. If they could get out of here without another go-round over the kids and their g-d Real Christmas. She wondered how many divorces could be traced directly to holiday spending. “You know what, hon? We need to face the toy aisle again.”

Cub followed her down the end zone and back into the mind-numbing array of unacceptable choices. She picked up a toy ax and jovially pretended to murder Mickey Mouse. Cub’s mind was elsewhere. He blew his breath out, looking worried. She put down her weapon. “What? Did Greg say something?”

“No, just . . . I’m thinking about that logging. How are we supposed to decide?”

“I don’t know. Look at the facts?”

“What are they?” he asked.

As if she knew. They both stood flummoxed before the T-Rex power squirt guns, sonic blasters, and light-up puffer worm-balls that smelled insidiously toxic.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “when you clear-cut a mountain it can cause a landslide. I’m not crying wolf here, Cub, it’s a fact. You can see it happening where they logged over by the Food King, there’s a river of mud sliding over the road. And that’s exactly what happened in Mexico, where the butterflies were before. They clear-cut the mountain, and a flood brought the whole thing down on top of them. You should see the pictures on the Internet.”

She wished she hadn’t seen them herself, they haunted her so. There were children involved, a school buried. Her mind would not quit posing horror-movie images against her will, and questions she didn’t want asked. Would a village just flatten like a house of cards? Or would the homes lift and float, the way vehicles did, giving a person some time to get out?