Gert was alone a lot.
As in, almost all the time.
So, when she had company, she talked.
“Spornosexual,” she continued. “Not so much about the grooming, all about the body. I wanna see me one of them. Was he one of them?”
Okay.
That sounded more like Mag.
“I’m afraid I’m not keeping track of all the terms for dudes these days, Gert,” I admitted in an effort not to label Mag with the ridiculous word of “spornosexual.”
“Well, I got lots of time on my hands and I know it all,” she replied. “You have questions, ask me. I got answers. These days, everything is confusing. You gotta do your research. I know what heteronormative is, and you don’t wanna be that. I know cisnormative, and you don’t wanna be that either. And binary and nonbinary, and not that stuff you do when you’re in class with your bits and bytes.”
She then laughed and took the endcap probably a little faster than the King Soopers management wished their scooters to go.
But the next aisle was cookies, so she had reason.
“How’d the date go bad?” she asked.
Not because my brother is a jerk, surprisingly, but because I was a bitch, I did not answer.
“He just wasn’t my type,” I said.
To that, she stopped on a scooter squeal and looked up to me.
Gert had curly gray hair, two missing teeth, three sons and a daughter who lived in different states and did their best from far away to take care of their mother, who flatly refused to move closer to her children.
And she fell in love with computers the minute she saw her first one in 1981 (she knew the exact year, and by the by, it was August).
In other words, we were kindred spirits two generations apart.
She budgeted everything from groceries to gas to electricity.
But she paid Charlie for tech support, because now, she lived on her computer with her email friends and her Facebook groups and her online forums, and if her system was down, her entire life was interrupted, and she was even more alone than her normal alone.
This being how we met.
And when I went to fix her computer and saw the state of her, and her house, bimonthly grocery shops and more than occasional trips to the likes of Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden, not to mention, me talking her into letting me clean her pad every once in a while, became part of my schedule.
I also talked her into giving up her yearly support payment to Computer Raiders, which felt disloyal to Charlie, but if something came up, she had my number. I didn’t charge, but that didn’t mean she could afford a trip around the world.
But for Gert and her fixed income, one thing loosening up for her meant a lot.
Another reason for my presence at the grocery store and our eventual trip to some family restaurant chain.
We’d have our usual discussion about it, but I’d be the one paying for both, and Gert would be all about the gratitude in order to hide her relief that she could pay her winter gas bill and maybe afford a haircut.
“That’s it. You’re in the doldrums because he wasn’t your type?” she asked.
“Do you want the marshmallow Milanos?” I asked back to deflect.
“Evan, talk to me.”
I focused on her to see she was very focused on me.
She was also worried.
“He was a great guy,” I said softly. “And I messed it up.”
“How’d a sweet, pretty girl like you mess it up?” she returned softly.
“It’s a long story,” I told her.
“Well, I got all day. But I know you don’t,” she said. “Still, I got all day, every day, and everything else on my body is goin’ south, some of it literally, but my ears work just fine. So, you wanna talk, I’m an old lady, my husband’s dead, but I remember the way it was and that it was hard work, finding a man.”
“I’m actually not in the market for a man, Gert. It was a blind date. I just…liked him.”
She tipped her head to the side. “And you can’t fix what you messed up?”
Mag had exited the premises with a slam of the door.
I doubted it.
But for his sake, I wouldn’t even try.
I shook my head.
Gert motored toward the Milanos, mumbling, “Shame.”
She had that right.
“Think about you,” she said, grabbing a pack of the toasted marshmallow Milanos. “I think about you all the time. Minute I met you, I was surprised you hadn’t gotten yourself claimed. But that happens a lot.”
She kept motoring.
And talking.
But I grabbed another pack of toasted marshmallow Milanos, and a double dark chocolate, both her favorites, because she’d be through the pack she nabbed in a day, but she also wouldn’t take three because she knew I’d eventually be buying them.
I tossed them in the cart, and she talked through it.