Every Vow You Break Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was early afternoon.
    Once she hit the town, Lara found Green’s pretty quickly. It was a massive structure with its name spelled loud and proud on its roof in Hollywood-style letters. Lara swung into a parking place near the front of the building. Like Trout Island and the road she had just travelled, the vast car park seemed to be practically empty. For a second she entertained a fantasy that the end of the world had arrived and she and Jack were the only survivors.
    She opened the car door, almost having to push against the heat waves coming from the baking tarmac. Not only was it hot outside the chilled car, but the clouds had come down on this side of the mountain and the air hung damp and steamy as a Turkish bath.
    ‘Phew,’ Jack said, as she got him out.
    She found a trolley and put him in the child seat. As they went through the automatic glass doors into the building, a blast of icy air struck them and Lara shivered with relief. Inside, the shop was vaster even than the colossal exterior suggested. But Lara was pleased to see actual people. Mothers with small children glided up and down acres of brightly lit aisles, filling their trolleys with packets and boxes and loud foil sacks. Muffled muzak added a surreal, trance-like quality to the place, reminding her of the gas station back in Trout Island. She steered her trolley into the first aisle and began to work methodically up and down to get her bearings, so she knew what lived where and how much things cost.
    Her little boy was in Jack heaven, reaching out with want whenever he saw something that took his fancy: a shiny advertising balloon, a brightly coloured packet of biscuits. There was so much stuff in this store – so many different varieties of coffee and breakfast cereals, so many different types of juice. Lara’s brain tried to take in a whole hundred-yard wall of various blends: from sugar-free and made-from-concentrate, to not-made-from-concentrate, protein added, fibre added, organic, gluten free …
    In the end, she settled for the things that looked familiar. She had enough on her plate without having to worry about her children turning their noses up at the unusual. So she piled the trolley with pasta, tinned tomatoes, dried beans and a delicious looking Italian sausage that could pass for a luxury British banger. She was pleased to find organic milk, having read horror stories about the amount of hormones forced down the throats of intensively farmed American cows. She didn’t want her boys growing breasts.
    She put two six-packs of beer into the trolley. But when she asked one of the many uniformed employees on the shop floor where they kept the wine, he told her they didn’t sell it in supermarkets and she would have to visit the liquor store at the far end of the plaza. Her informant spoke slowly, as if she were somehow backward for not knowing this.
    She stood for a while debating with herself whether she should buy a small but hideously expensive jar of Marmite. In the end she slid it into the trolley. Marcus wouldn’t last the summer without it.
    Six weeks was a long, long time. A long time for making things right, and a long time to keep a young boy amused. She cruised the toy aisle and added a sketchbook and a colouring book, cheap watercolour paints, felt-tip pens and child-friendly scissors and glue. She didn’t want Jack getting bored, because that led to guilt on her part, and they had only been allowed one suitcase each on the flight, so she had brought just a couple of his essential toys with them. She also grabbed a ball, a hoop and something called a ‘whiffle ball set’ to the trolley.
    Jack reached for the ball. She let him hold it.
    ‘Excuse me.’ A small, dark-haired woman with a tiny baby in a wire cage on the top of her trolley needed to reach the shelf behind Lara.
    Lara moved along a little way and the woman reached up a toned, freckled arm to lift down a plastic tub of formula milk.
    The baby slept, its