Something New by Janis Thomas

Ben withdraws a square of nylon fabric from his jeans pocket and proceeds to unfold it into a ginormous grocery sack. The blond cashier flashes him an appreciative, aren’t-you-the-coolest-guy-in-the-world smile and begins to load his items into the bag.
    I turn back to the cashier and give a curt shake of my head. “I forgot it.”
    The girl just shrugs and gives me a patient smile that seems to say,
That’s okay. We get a lot of your kind
, and forcefully snaps open a paper sack.
    Ben and I finish at the same time and push toward the sliding doors. As we head out into the sunlight, I glance over at his cart.
    “Nice bag,” I comment wryly.
    “My wife’s an environmental lawyer,” he says. “What can I say?”
    As we traverse the parking lot, I realize that my Flex is parked right next to his Volvo station wagon, and I let thecoincidence roll right off my back. I glance at the bumper stickers adorning the rear end of the Volvo:
Obama/Biden ’08
,
I Brake for Marsupials
,
Three-Mile-High Club/Sky’s the Limit
.
    I narrow my eyes at him as he pops the hatch open. He catches the look.
    “What?”
    I should keep my mouth shut. I know I should. Delving too deeply into the personal life of a married man probably is not something a married woman should be doing, especially a married woman who wants to reinvent herself for the better. I am not Catholic. I cannot go to confession and be absolved of my lustful, covetous thoughts. But I absolutely have no filter when it comes to blurting out questions I just need to have answered.
    “Three-mile-high club?” I ask. “I didn’t know they had bumper stickers for that one.”
    He shakes his head and laughs. “No, no, no. You’re thinking of the
mile
-high club. It’s not that.” He gives a rueful smile. “Linda keeps telling me to scrape that one off, says I’m giving the wrong impression…which, obviously, I am. That’s from the skydiving place.” He says it casually, as if he got it at Jiffy Lube. “I won’t scrape it off. I’m too damn proud of it.”
    “You jumped out of a plane?” I ask, incredulous. I know people do it all the time. People with death wishes or people with nothing and no one to live for. People who are deranged.
    “Twice,” he says. “It was awesome. I posted the video on Facebook. You should friend me…Or I’ll friend you. You can check it out.”
    “I don’t do Facebook.” I feel like I am confessing a heinous sin, but Ben takes it in stride.
    “Well, it was awesome. I mean, I look like I’m about tothrow up in the video, but…wow, your heart’s pounding, your mind, totally blank. It was the greatest. I highly recommend it.”
    “But…but…why?” I can’t wrap my mind around the “awesome” thing. I mean, how can hurtling toward earth at ninety miles an hour, wondering if your chute will open, knowing that if it doesn’t, you’re about to become a human pancake, be fun? “Why would you want to do that?” I ask again.
    He shrugs. “I guess, I don’t know, I’ve always felt it’s good to try new things, especially if they scare the shit out of you.” He loads his one super-sack into the back of the Volvo. “If you stop trying new things, you might as well just stop.”
    I stare at him for a long moment, thinking about his words. They are reverberating madly inside my brain. My synapses are firing at the recognition of important information, cathartic information, perhaps. Ben has no idea the impact his sentence is having on me.
If you stop trying new things, you might as well just stop.
    He finger-waves as he climbs behind the wheel of his car. I continue to stare at him as he slowly pulls the Volvo out of the parking slot. Before he drives away, the passenger window rolls down and I see him lean over. I bend at the waist to face him.
    “This was fun,” he says. “I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed grocery shopping as much.”
    I am completely at a loss for words, so I just smile. And stare at him until the