an eye-opening trip for some groceries (lyn)

I’m making lemon bars and a salad for my Oscar get-together on Sunday.  I go to the local D’Agastino’s to buy some of the ingredients.  The lemons are $1 each and I need six, so I skip these, feeling much like my mother who will skip tomatoes for a week if they are not well-priced.  I need pine nuts for my salad, and am shocked by their price: $12.39 for a small bag of pignoli nuts (which I am told are the same).  But then I see an exact replica of the bag I saw for $12.39, sitting on a shelf labeled $1.39.  I buy these.

I get to the check out and the young girl behind the register is sporting a bright red eye.  It looks nasty and new.  The woman behind me asks the cashier what happened. Her unexpected candor surprises me.  “Someone punched me in the eye,” she says.  Though I want to say more, all I do say is, “I hope that person isn’t in your life anymore.”  She nods and says, “They aren’t.”

The red-eyed girl rings up my pinenuts at $12.39.  It turns out, they were just misplaced. But because they were misplaced, the manager reluctantly agrees to honor the $1.39 price.

I leave the store feeling like I got the deal of the century, and wondering who would punch someone in the eye, and thankful I don’t know any people who would.