The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall Page A

a basket with corn, avocados, and bundles of fresh herbs in clear plastic bags. She ran her hands under the sprinklers that were keeping the heirloom carrots fresh, mesmerized, until her fingers turned red and she recognized that they were cold. In this moment of disembodiment she didn’t see Clara approach, pushing a cart filled with frozen foods, whole grain waffles, Lean Cuisines, pizza, and frozen yogurt, food for a working mother of toddlers, or for stocking a bomb shelter.
    “I don’t buy that stuff anymore,” Joan said, picking up a package of frozen breakfast burritos. “Too many preservatives.”
    “You do not want to have to shop or go out, just trust me,” Clara said, grabbing several bottles of wine and thrusting them at her chest. “You’re going to need these.”
    “I’ll just break out the expensive wine in the cellar!” Joan laughed, a sudden inappropriate blurt. Phil Collins was singing on the in-store speakers. Something in the air tonight.
    “That’s the spirit,” Clara said.
    It started in the lineup. A woman in an orange and white maxi skirt ahead of them held open the local paper and said to her friend, “I feel sorry for the wife, you know.”
    It was then that Joan realized the paper had reused the photograph of her from the awards ceremony. Underneath the photo the cutline read, WOODBURY ’ S WIFE TOLD POLICE SHE HAD NO IDEA .
    The other lady, in green plastic gardening shoes Joan could see as she stared down with her head bowed, replied, “She had to know. To know and to have not said anything, that’s worse than anything he’s done.”
    Clara grabbed her hand and whispered, “Go to the car, I’ll pay.”
    Joan wanted to kick the women. Her foot actually involuntarily fell forward. But she did as Clara instructed, pushing by them and breaking into a run after she got through the sliding doors.
    They were mostly silent on the drive home, until Joan drew a heart in the passenger-side window and said, “Imagine the person you love and trust becoming a different person overnight. What would you do?”
    “I’d want a bottle of Percocet, and a gun to go shoot him with.”
    “I thought you didn’t like guns.”
    “That’s why — I’m afraid if I had one, I’d use it.”
    “You’ve never been married,” Joan said.
    Clara frowned. “I’ve been in love,” she said. “I understand devotion.”
    “Marriage is different.”
    “That’s archaic.”
    “Someone could be setting him up,” she said.
    Clara pursed her lips, checking her blind spot before changing lanes. “Yes,” she said.
    “George is essentially a very good person,” Joan said. “But that is one of those meaningless sentences. What is a good person? Under the worst of circumstances, who can say what we would do? For all we know, we might be the worst people on earth.”
    “You’re not, Joan. You know that.”
    Joan remembered what the woman in the grocery store said.
    Joan was no longer a mother and a nurse and a person with her own history. She symbolized evil, and for that, people were not kind. That the front windows of her house were streaked with egg yolk said it just as plainly.

MONDAY AFTERNOON

SIX
    SADIE WENT TO school at the end of the day, unsure what to do with herself otherwise. Her mother and Clara went to visit her father at the police station and she didn’t want to go. The house felt empty and imposing, and she was afraid of the journalists buzzing around outside. Going on as usual might actually be comforting, even though she had to show her student ID to a police officer to get in through the front gate of her school, and the security guard was extra-thorough going through her knapsack.
    She walked with sneakers squeaking out her presence on the polished hardwood towards the principal’s office, where the rules of high school dictated she acquire a note to explain her absence. Her right toe poked through her green cotton school socks. Everything felt askew. She’d never been to