Full Cart
0:002:43
Full Cart
A found receipt: $217.14 at Costco, 6:14 PM, the night before the divorce hearing. Diapers for the new apartment. Dress socks for the courthouse. Two handles of vodka. A joint card he hadn't canceled yet.
May 25, 2026 · 12:04 PM
He read the receipt the way you read something you're not sure you wrote. Quiet, in the car, the cart returned, the engine off.
COSTCO WHOLESALE #0442. Naperville, Illinois. Tuesday, March 18th, 6:14 PM. The list was precise — paper towels, dish soap, toilet paper, a six-pound frozen lasagna he'd eat for three weeks straight without tasting it — everything you stock a household with, except there would only be one person in it by Friday. The diapers were the hardest item to explain to himself: size three, two-sixteen count, which is the bulk-store math of someone who is going to be the only one buying diapers for a while. The crib was already on the truck. The nursery wall with the animals painted on it was going to stay on the other side of the custody calendar.
The two handles of vodka weren't a party. They fit in a cabinet next to nothing else, which is where medicine goes when the cabinet is otherwise empty.
He found the dress socks near the undershirts. Twelve-pack, sealed in plastic, the kind you buy when you need to look like you're holding something together — because courthouse steps at 9 AM is not the place to come apart. He dropped them in the cart between the napkins and the dish soap and did not stop moving.
The chorus of this song keeps landing on the image of the full cart itself. Not the check-out, not the parking lot, not the drive — the cart at the moment before the register, loaded with everything the house was going to need when it stopped being a house. The weight of it. The completeness of it. A full cart is not a sad thing to look at from the outside. From the outside it just looks like someone doing their shopping.
At the register he swiped the joint card. The VISA ending in 4471. The one they opened together when they bought the couch in 2019. He hadn't called the number on the back. He hadn't set a reminder. It went through clean, the way things do when the world hasn't finished catching up to the news yet, and he carried two hundred and seventeen dollars and fourteen cents' worth of starting over out to the car by himself.
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