Free Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan

the corrugated garage doors used to protect storefronts in the city. The space on the right was a tux place called Finest Formals, the one on the left a travel agency, he thinks, maybe a Shawmut Bank before that. Whatever it was, it didn’t last long.
    Far ahead, toward the heart of the mall, backlit by the bright atrium in front of Penney’s, a few shoppers glide like shades, one a mother with a stroller. So people are still open, a good sign. He zeroes in on the three-sided kiosk of a directory, striding fast—he only has half an hour for his lunch break—then stopping dead to search the floorplan of the mall, sectioned and color-coded like a child’s game board.
    His mission is simple: Buy something she will love, and love him for buying. Nothing useful, like a new camera to take pictures of the baby (that’s on a different list), or a brake job for her Elantra (on no list but his, nagging as a jagged cavity or the sudden absence, now, of the rubber band). It has to be intimate yet unexpected, arrived at by magic, a consumer version of mind reading. Price isn’t an issue, within limits. Manny’s thinking a hundred, a hundred-fifty, leaning toward the extravagant on principle. He needs this to be good.
    So, clothes? Right now she doesn’t have a size, and even when he’s buying for himself he doesn’t trust his taste.
    Perfume? They all smell too strong to him, and the top of her dresser is solid bottles. The odds of getting something she doesn’t have and likes are slim.
    Music? Too high school, not personal enough, the same with electronics.
    Which leaves the fool’s last resort: jewelry.
    Mansour Jewelers is D11, tucked into the wing right beside Penney’s, but that’s where he bought Jacquie’s necklace. He’ll have to go all the way down the second level past Kmart and try Zales. Earrings, pearls or diamonds, as big as he can afford—a simple plan, yet he can’t keep it in his head. On the escalator, angling above the cotton-wadded North Pole and its empty red-and-gold throne (a bad sign), a blankness comes over him, wiping his mind clean, a purposeful short circuit, like when he thinks of Jacquie laughing from her bathroom, or the branching crack in her ceiling, or how she looks when she’s asleep. He willfully releases the memory, and creeping into the vacuum is a feeling of surrender, as if it’s no use.
    Everything’s open on the second floor, but traffic is unnaturally sparse. He passes a pregnant woman by Hickory Farms, and then a minute later spies another below, eating a giant cookie beside a fountain glittering with pennies. On the far side of Kmart there are two more, and more strollers, more toddlers. It shouldn’t surprise him—this is just who comes here, like the grandmothers lunching at the Lobster—but it forces him to question what he would have done if Jacquie had wanted the baby.
    He said he wanted to marry her, and she laughed. He knows—he knew then—that that wasn’t realistic, and yet he was ready to follow through with the rest of his life, honestly pledging himself, maybe because she never took him seriously. He hasn’t asked Deena, and the way he feels now he doubts he ever will, and there’s something wrong with that. He can just hear what his abuelita would say.
    It’s also the first Christmas he doesn’t have to buy a gift for his lita—other than a wreath for the visit he keeps putting off—another absence that has him distracted. He has the needling, bad-dream feeling that he’s supposed to get something else while he’s here, but can’t quite figure out what, or for whom. He wonders if Coach will be alone over Christmas, if maybe he should arrange to look in on him before he heads down to Deena’s. Yes, definitely, he can set it up Monday at the Olive Garden, and while Manny has no idea what to get him either, just having a plan to concentrate on—something to work toward and look forward to beyond tonight—helps.
    Or helps some. A manager, he’s