"You don't know him. Candyman is his nickname."
"A boyfriend?"
"No. He is a potential customer — maybe he will buy a painting." She threw in some lies. "I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry."
"I'm not worried about you," he said in an indifferent tone with a sotto voce of disgust.
"When is your game?"
"Tomorrow"
"What time?"
"6:30."
"You and Betty can take a taxi there; but you'll see me on the bleachers when the balls start flying."
She remembered her promise because of the serendipitous ramblings of Candyman; and vomiting once on the edge of the road, she journeyed back to Albany. Sick to her stomach and dazed when she arrived back at her home, she went to sleep on the nearest couch for a half hour before going out to buy some groceries. She spent an hour or two of the afternoon interminably lost in aisles of food. She kept thinking about Rick and how the two of them used to bump their carts into each other as they raced through the aisles. It depressed her to think that this would never happen again, and yet she didn't see why relationships should end in such an all or nothing cessation as if differences in outlook among changing beings meant a broken contract of quid pro quo. Had their relationship been nothing but a bartering of services the whole time. She supposed that this was the concept of a relationship to most people.