Angie cleared her throat. It appeared that she was going to be the first to weigh in with some useful suggestions as to how we could live our lives more safely.

“Is anyone else concerned about the fact that Dad has turned into this paranoid freakout crazy person?”

THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME to revisit what I would call the Asshole Issue.

Maybe you’ve already reached a conclusion. Let’s say you’ve voted in the yes column. Zack Walker is an asshole. No doubt about it. Made up your mind during The Backpack Incident, haven’t looked back. If that’s how you feel now, I don’t see you changing your mind anytime soon.

But maybe you’ve been less quick to judge. Maybe you’re on the fence. You understand how a man’s concern for his family could lead him to behave a bit irrationally at times. You’ve been there. Well, we’re coming to the part that will reinforce your convictions, one way or the other.

A day or so after my safety lecture, Sarah and I had gone over to Mindy’s Market to pick up a few items. Despite my rant, I was trying to be less fanatical in my approach to family safety, and part of that included being more relaxed generally about things. So when Sarah arrived home and said she wanted to go and pick up some groceries, I offered to come along. I’d been in my office, making pencil notations on some pages I’d just printed out, and met her at the front door after she changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater. We each grabbed light jackets because, even though we were well into spring, there was a cool wind blowing in from the north.

There was lots to talk about. At least lots for Sarah to talk about. It had been a busy day at The Metropolitan.

“So I tell Leanne, you know Leanne?”

I said yes.

“I want her to go down to the waterfront, where there’s a press conference being called by Alderman Winsted, about all this garbage that’s piling up by the yacht club, but it’s raining out, and she says she can’t go because the ground’s going to be soft and mushy, and she’s wearing this new Donna Karan thing, and these nice shoes, because she thought she was going up to cover the Wang trial-”

“The which?”

“Wang. The guy who cut up his girlfriend and dropped her body parts all over five counties.”

“Okay.”

I was struggling to release a cart, which was jammed into the next one.

“Except the Wang thing has been put off a day, and Walters called in sick-”

“Again?”

“I know, this is like the fourth time in two months, and it’s always his first day back after a couple off, and he always calls from Ottawa, where he’s boffing this chick from the Citizen, and the way I figure it, he just wants a long weekend, right? And then the M.E. wants to know why some fucking moron copy editor rewrote Owen’s story about the guy who was charged with possessing all this kiddie porn, and his defense is artistic freedom, and I say, maybe it’s because Owen wouldn’t know an interesting opening sentence if it came along and bit him on his nose, and he says that may be true, but maybe next time, the copy editor could rewrite it in such a way that she doesn’t switch the names of the accused and the defense lawyer. Anyway, what happened with you today?”

“Nothing.” I had the cart free now and we were trolling past a display of fresh fruit.

“Did you hear from the kids today?” Sarah asked.

Paul had phoned on his cell around noon to ask whether I could check in his room and see whether he’d left a science assignment on top of his dresser. I was on the cordless. “Okay, I’m in your room now, looking at the top of your dresser, and I see no science assignment,” I said.

He paused at the other end of the line. “Pull back my covers and see if it’s in my bed.”

I tried that. “No luck,” I said. “But I have found a Penthouse.”

“Never mind.”

I hadn’t heard anything from Angie, although before leaving in the morning she informed me that I owed her $127. Had I borrowed $127 from her, I asked, because if I had, my memory had been wiped clean of the incident. She sighed and reminded me that we had agreed to reimburse her for half of the cost of her new pants and top, an arrangement about which I knew nothing.

“I told her that,” Sarah said.

“Well then, you owe her $127.”

Sarah said we needed romaine, maybe a couple of steaks, and we were totally out of fabric softener. I expressed concern about how often we were using the barbecue, which, by the way, I still had to get fixed.

“There was a story, in your paper, about how when meat cooks over hot coals, it turns into pure cancer.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” she said. As we passed the newsstand, the cover of Time, which was about a new blockbuster science fiction movie, caught my eye.

“I’ll just be a sec,” I said, and Sarah rolled on ahead without me.

I flipped through the Time, glanced at the covers of several other magazines (Oprah had managed to make the cover of her own magazine again, which I thought warranted some sort of inquiry), and quickly scanned my eye over the newly released paperback novels. By the time I decided to rejoin Sarah, she was long gone.

I walked along the front of the store, between the checkouts and the ends of the aisles, peering down each one, looking for a glimpse of her.

I spotted her down the aisle where they kept all the pastas and tomato sauces and twenty-three different kinds of Kraft Dinner. She was about three-quarters of the way down, and about halfway stood a nearly empty shopping cart, purse tucked into the spot where you can place small children. As is usually the case, Sarah had her eyes on the shelves, and not on the cart, or the purse. Fortunately, there was no one else anywhere near the cart, so she wasn’t immediately at risk of having it snatched.

I passed by the only other person in the aisle, a young blonde woman in an off-white suit looking at garbage bags, and as I approached Sarah I waited to see when she might take her eyes off the various spaghetti sauces to check that her purse was still where she’d left it in the cart.

I was doing a slow burn.

It was clear that I was completely wasting my time trying to get anyone in my household to exercise even the most basic level of common sense. I had, I knew, become something of a nag where Sarah and her purse were concerned. There had been stories on the news. That woman with the lottery ticket. That other woman, who’d lost the pictures of her sister’s wedding. There were some things you just didn’t do, and leaving your purse unattended in a busy grocery store was one of them.

It appeared, from where I was standing, that the purse wasn’t even snapped shut at the top. Wasn’t that thoughtful. A thief didn’t even have to go to the trouble of running off with her purse, he could just peek inside and help himself to what he wanted.

What was she thinking? You need your hands free when you’re shopping, she’d tell me.

You might think that a woman who spends her day sending journalists to court to write about men who’ve cut their girlfriends up into bits and distributed them like Wal-Mart flyers would be aware that there are a lot of not-nice people out there. People who might walk off with a woman’s purse while she is debating the merits of onion-and-garlic versus three-cheese pasta sauce.

It was only a matter of time before someone walked off with that purse. So I had a choice to make. Would it be a stranger, or would it be me?

Don’t do it, my conscience said. Don’t do it.

The incident over the keys, and my hiding her car, seemed largely forgotten. We were talking to each other, Sarah and I. Things had been fairly remarkable between the sheets the last week or so, and I had performed, if I may say so, spectacularly. There was peace in our time.