"You don't know him. Candyman is his nickname." "A boyfriend?" "No. He is a potential customer — maybe he will buy a painting." She threw in some lies. "I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry." "I'm not worried about you," he said in an indifferent tone with a sotto voce of disgust. "When is your game?" "Tomorrow" "What time?" "6:30." "You and Betty can take a taxi there; but you'll see me on the bleachers when the balls start flying." She remembered her promise because of the serendipitous ramblings of Candyman; and vomiting once on the edge of the road, she journeyed back to Albany. Sick to her stomach and dazed when she arrived back at her home, she went to sleep on the nearest couch for a half hour before going out to buy some groceries. She spent an hour or two of the afternoon interminably lost in aisles of food. She kept thinking about Rick and how the two of them used to bump their carts into each other as they raced through the aisles. It depressed her to think that this would never happen again, and yet she didn't see why relationships should end in such an all or nothing cessation as if differences in outlook among changing beings meant a broken contract of quid pro quo. Had their relationship been nothing but a bartering of services the whole time. She supposed that this was the concept of a relationship to most people. At this moment her life was a foolish quandary of being unable to figure out if there was more salience in trying to reestablish family ties or independent strivings at all cost. She filled her cart, took out items, and then replaced them with others of different labels and equivalent prices. She couldn't figure out how many people she should be shopping for even though she had each person's tastes in mind in making selections. The closer she got to the cash register the more exacerbated were her doubts about buying most of her products, so before she purchased anything she abandoned most of it in a vacant cart and shoved it off once into the oblivion. When she got to the trunk of her car she had only one meager bag of groceries. She thrust it into the trunk, slammed down the lid of the trunk in vexation, and then buckled herself into the coolness of the vinyl seat. She passed a bridal boutique many times in the car and then spontaneously parked in front of the building that she had been rotating around. The saleswomen there could not find happiness in dressing the strangely sullen woman with monosyllabic mendacities of date and place for this celebratory solemnization. Under the lattice inside the store, staring at herself in a tripartite mirror, she didn't like the trains of the wedding dresses she was trying on. They were too short, florid to the point of gaudy, or not as ornate as she thought they should be. When she drove down to the end of the drive at the junction of the house she noticed that Nathaniel's dog was the only one that was chained up on the side of the house and that Michael's