I get it—you’re still mad. We can’t really deal with that without talking.”
“But I said I don’t want to!” she stated, raising her voice again.
“Franci,” he said quietly. “Could we try not to make a big scene here…”
“Look, I told you, I’m in a hurry. You still using the same cell number?” she asked. He nodded. “Great, I’ll call you sometime. Now, excuse me, if you’d please just leave me alone, I’d appreciate it very much.” Polite as that might’ve sounded, it was stated angrily, and people had stopped shopping and began watching them.
She turned away from him and he grabbed her arm again. “Franci, I am not going away. This is important.”
Suddenly there was a very large shadow over both of them, and Sean, who was a little over six feet tall and in excellent shape, was looking up at Paul Bunyan. And Paul was not happy. He was scowling.
“Everything all right, ma’am?” he asked, looking at Franci.
“Fine,” she said. “Old boyfriend. Nothing to worry about.” Then she focused on Sean. “Goodbye. Great seeing you again. Now scram.”
In a moment of temporary insanity, Sean went after her again. “No you don’t. We have to get together for that conversation,” he said. “Since I can’t call you, how about I go over to your house and wait for—”
He felt himself being plucked off his feet. His basket of produce went tumbling away as he was launched into a pile of melons. But Paul Bunyan didn’t let go of him. “She said it’s time for you to hit the road, bud.”
“Listen, pal, you got it all wrong,” Sean said. “I’d never do anything to—”
And suddenly Franci was there. Saving him. “Thank you, but it’s all right. He’s harmless.”
Sean was being held down with his back against the cantaloupe and honeydew melons and he was suddenly incensed. That statement about him being harmless made him growl and snarl dangerously.
“You gonna leave the nice lady alone, bud?” the big man asked.
“You’re gonna get your hands off me this second or you’ll be sorry,” Sean warned, his very masculinity threatened.
“I doubt that, my friend. So, when we understand each other, I’ll let you up.”
“Fine,” Sean angrily shot back. “Let go of me. Now.”
The lumberjack backed away slowly as Sean eased himself off the melons, many of them rolling around on the floor as he did so. A couple of them split open as they fell, spilling their slimy, seedy guts in the aisle. Sean brushed off his jacket where he’d been grabbed, trying to appear both fearless and dignified. And then he took off after Franci, his hand on her shoulder to stop her from walking away again. “Now look,” he said.
He felt the back collar of his shirt and jacket clutched in an iron grip and he whirled on the giant, hitting him square in the jaw with his fist. He suspected he’d broken his hand, but no way was he letting on. He did wince in pain, however, while the very large man merely turned his brick of a face to the side.
“You shouldn’t’a done that, little man,” the guy said. It took him roughly one second to draw back his fist and plaster Sean in the face hard enough to send him reeling into the melons. Then to the floor. Sean saw a lot of stars and was aware of the melons as they began to bounce around the produce section. And there was blood—he wasn’t sure where from since his entire face felt as if it had been through a meat grinder.
“Hey!” Franci shouted. “What’s the matter with you? I told you to leave it alone, he’s harmless!”
“No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” the big man said. “It looked like you needed help. Maybe you like being grabbed like that in the grocery store, huh, babe?”
Sean muttered something about not being harmless and tried to get to his feet, without success. The big man said, “Just stay down where you are, buster.” But Sean was intent on getting up and he’d just about made it to his feet when the man took two giant steps in his direction. That was all it took for Franci to launch herself on the lumberjack with a cry of outrage. She had her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and screamed bloody murder while pummeling him on the back.
“I. Told. You. To. Leave. Him. Alone!” she shrieked.
Paul Bunyan whirled around and around, trying to shake her loose, but she was on him like a tick on a hound.
Then the scene got a lot more interesting. “No! No! No! No! No!” screamed a store manager, running up to them, followed closely by another man and a couple of young bag boys. A crowd gathered and the grocery employees peeled Franci off the lumberjack, but she was kicking her heart out the whole time. “The police are coming!” the store manager yelled. “Stop this at once! Stop!”
And Sean absently thought, This really isn’t going how I planned.
Right about then, Sean attempted to stand and reclaim his manhood, only to slip on some slimy melon guts and crash into the floor again. He didn’t exactly pass out, but he was on the nether edges, half listening to the conversation going on above him.
“He threw the first punch,” a voice said.
“You threw him in the melons!” Franci yelled.
“He was grabbing your arm after you told him to go away and leave you alone! Shoot me for trying to lend a hand!”
“But then the little guy did hit the big guy,” someone said. And Sean thought, I am not a little guy. I’m definitely six-one. I bench two-fifty with no problem.
“But the big guy plastered the little guy, knocked him out.”
“I am not little,” Sean mumbled through a swollen jaw, though no one was listening to him.
“I didn’t ask you to protect me!” Franci shouted. “I told you to leave him alone!”
Yeah, Sean thought. Because I’m harmless. Just how I always wanted her to see me. Harmless. And that was Sean Riordan’s last coherent thought.
The next time he was conscious, a paramedic was waving some disgusting-smelling ammonia under his nose and holding an ice pack to his cheek. The ammonia made him gag and the ice pack hurt like hell. And what was worse, they were all in handcuffs. “Damn,” he groaned. “Damn, damn, damn.”
Three hours later, Sean was being held in a windowless room with a locked door down at the Eureka police station. The paramedics had recommended that he go to the hospital to have his head examined, to which Sean replied, “Well, no kidding.”
But while he was in the cell with his buddy the lumberjack, the big man apologized. Sean apologized right back. And what Sean learned was, Dennis Avery was not a lumberjack but a big rig driver who was on his way home, picking up some groceries for the little woman, when he got snared into that whole domestic between Franci and Sean.
So, as Sean was known to do, he told Dennis his life story. Or at least the part that had to do with breaking up with Franci.
“Man,”
