thirty
sunday, april 27

Cheski picked me up at nine in the morning for our culinary field trip. “You get how this works?” I asked.

“You gotta do the hours to shop at the co-op.”

“Yup. To keep the prices down, individual members take turns working at the market. It’s different for us. We sell our excess farm yield at super-low prices to the market and that gets us a membership. There’s just so much you can freeze or can, and there’s no way we’d dump it. As long as it’s got a forty-eight-hour shelf life, the co-op will take it.”

“How many hours would I need to work?”

“It’s proportional to the volume of your purchases.”

Cheski’s face dropped; his eating habits could require him to work a sixty-hour week.

“I’m joking! Usually, it’s no more than a few hours a month. The co-op has thousands of members.”

Cheski’s phone rang, and I answered it for him. Lamendola was on the line, jabbering at rapper speed.

“Are you kidding?” I said into the phone. Cheski poked me in the arm for information. “He was up all night going through the list of accounts Harry Goldberg finally found the time to send,” I relayed. “Turns out Bob had a unit at HG storage. Unit 125.”

Cheski slammed on the brakes and swung the car around. “Get Frank on the phone.”