Free The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz

it.”
    â€œWell.” She stopped him. “So you might not have time for any little jobs, then.”
    â€œI have time,” Ashley said amiably. “What do you need?”
    The attic banister, she told him. And the parking lot leveled somehow, if it wasn’t too expensive. And maybe it was time to look at her
own roof again, since the one Daniel had so lovingly installed was beginning to assume the consistency of oatmeal. When Ashley had time.
    â€œI’ll make time,” he said warmly.
    Naomi shook her head, gave him the benefit of her goodwill, and left.
    Well, that was how it went in Stop & Shop, she reasoned, turning the final aisle. Come in for a few marginally palatable foodstuffs, leave with an update on the current police investigation and a semiformal commitment from your contractor. A veritable agora on the Greek model, she thought, flinging a bag of rice cakes into her cart with happy abandon and heading for produce, such as it was.
    Where, sharp enough to make the cans in her cart rattle against the mesh, she stopped short.
    The woman was standing before a case filled with pale green iceberg lettuces, each wrapped in shiny plastic, each looking less appetizing than the next. Wedged on one side of the lettuces was a box of orange tomatoes, the kind that looked bad and tasted bad (as opposed to the kind that looked good and tasted bad), and on the other a neatly arranged waterfall of waxed cucumbers—as if some brilliant grocery clerk had taken it upon himself to relieve the shopper of the necessity for creativity in salad composition: iceberg, tomato, cucumber, voilà!
    The woman was poised before this vision, legs slightly apart, hands on hips. The shopping cart beside her held precisely one item: a large bottle of generic seltzer. She wore heavy boots, a big sweater jacket with a dark brown pattern, and overalls of magenta cloth with long shoulder straps that knotted through the front bib. The sweater came from Mexico, and the overalls, Naomi knew, had been bought in a shop called Reminiscence, on a side street in Greenwich Village. She herself had two pairs just like them at home, one black, one pea green—very useful for days you felt fat or had your period. The woman was tall—taller than Naomi—and wide-hipped, and her black hair hit her shoulders with the kind of dense, tight curls some people who weren’t Jewish tried to achieve through chemicals.
    My kind, it came to her.
    She remembered something she had read long before, in an anthropology class, about the lone survivor of a Native American tribe, adopted by whites, studied by whites. He had lived his whole life among whites, with nobody to talk to. Sharp as a knife, she felt her own longing.

    The woman was probably a summer person. But then again it was late in the year for that.
    The woman was probably a leaf-peeper. But leaf-peepers ate at country inns, they didn’t visit the Stop & Shop, and if they did, it was for maple syrup, maple sugar, Cheddar cheese.
    She looked like about twenty women Naomi had known in her life, but Naomi was reasonably certain she wasn’t any of them. She looked like the person who would probably be her closest friend by now, if she’d never come to New Hampshire.
    Naomi and her kind, she thought. The sight was riveting: Lilith in the garden. So this is what I must look like to them, she thought.
    The woman shook her black hair in disgust. She reached for her cart and began to push it away. Naomi stepped forward. “Can I help you with something?” she heard herself say.
    The woman turned to look at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled broadly and shook her head. “I should have known.” Her voice was deep, underpinned by jubilant sarcasm. “Only I never thought it would be this bad. I told my husband, let’s move to Putney, at least. In Putney they’ve got a co-op. I know people in Putney. But no. Because he fell in love with