“Everybody needs a phone. It’s like… having a TV or a car. You just… need one.”
“A TV?”
Her mouth drops open. “You don’t have a TV?”
I don’t really know what a TV is, but I’m fairly sure we do not have one. “We don’t have electricity,” I tell her. “At the… at home.”
Her eyes go wide with excitement. “You live off-grid?”
I nod, not really sure what that means, either.
“Wow. That’s kinda cool. It’s very trendy to live off-grid these days. How do you cook?”
“We have a stove. It eats wood and makes fire.”
“Wow,” she says again. Only this time, she sighs the word out. “And what about lights? No lights, then?”
“Fire.”
She snaps her fingers. “Oh. They have those cool solar lanterns now. You just set them in the sun and they light up at night.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. They have a ton of solar shit these days. They even have solar generators. We have three of them for camping. My brothers are always getting new gadgets for camping like that. They’re big into the survival scene. And my uncle owns the Kitchen Sink down on the edge of town.”
“The Kitchen Sink?”
“It’s like a… like a military surplus store? For Shit Hits the Fan types.”
I have no idea what she’s going on about. But she’s excited about it, so I pretend to be as well. “That’s amazing.”
“We could go there and check it out if you want.”
“Go…”
“To the Kitchen Sink.”
“For…”
“I can get you a discount. He sells phones, and generators, and solar panels.”
I’m lost now. Completely lost. I will have to quiz Pie on all these things when I get home.
Thankfully, this conversation is cut short when the waitress appears with our food.
“We can go after we’re done eating,” Madeline says.
Or not.
“OK?”
I nod, clueless.
I hold out hope that Madeline will forget about the kitchen sink and we will take a romantic walk to the park. But after we’re done eating, she directs me outside to my truck.
“It’s not really walking distance from here. We should drive,” she says.
So I have no choice but to go along.