STORY TIME RELOAD: Thanksgiving Tales - In-Store Pickup
Author’s note: since Tumblr is being a recalcitrant motherfucker about persistently flagging and disappearing this story, I’m gonna try again as a whole new posting, text-only.
Drew had never really been the type of guy to get into the whole Black Friday thing. Sure, every once in a while, there was a sweet deal on a big-ass TV or a PlayStation or whatever, but he already had all that stuff. Why mess around with the crowds and the traffic just to score a deal that wasn’t really all that great, on shit that he already had? You could get most of that stuff online now anyway, and now that he was older and valued his time more, it was a far better deal to get something delivered to your door, and never have to leave your couch.
This year, though, Drew wasn’t on his own couch. He was in Florida, in the guest room of his in-laws’ house. Emily was super pregnant - “10 months, I swear to Christ,” she’d muttered the other day - and she, her mother and sister were in full Imminent Baby Arrival Mode. They’d all piled into Janine’s Lexus this morning and announced they’d be back in time for dinner, leaving Drew at the house with his father-in-law - or his stepfather-in-law, he guessed, he’d never been 100% on the correct title. Drew had never much cared for Dr. Daniels; the guy wasn’t much of a conversationalist, and in the three years he and Emily had been married, Drew had sure tried. But there just wasn’t that much they had in common, and Drew had always gotten the sense that the workaholic opthalmologist just didn’t get the big ex-jock marketing guy Emily had married. They were like two superficially similar examples of distinct species, seemed like.
The idea of spending the day hanging around his in-laws’ big, expensively decorated McMansion wasn’t all that appealing, and the notion of a grudging invitation to go play golf with Dr. Daniels even less so. Drew would rather shoot himself in the face than play golf anyway, much less with that guy. He didn’t know anybody in this part of Florida. He was starting to feel a little bit antsy, when he spotted the pile of picked-over Black Friday circulars from the morning paper sitting on the kitchen island.
That was how he found himself in SportsMart. They had some pretty good deals going on running shoes and workout gear, and as a bonus, the place was half-empty of shoppers. It was the last big tenant in an old dying mall, all the big-name stores gone, just an old-people’s cafeteria restaurant and a few sad little stores and the SportsMart keeping it alive. Places like this gave Drew the creeps, but at least it wasn’t crowded, and was it really that much creepier than the near-silent, manicured acres of his in-laws’ gated community?
Besides, Drew was being cruised, and in spite of himself, he was intrigued.
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