Chapter 2: Higher Powers
Orange juice, in a can; one loaf of bread, and one small jar of peanut butter; a newspaper, a tiny bag of jelly beans with a purple ribbon, on clearance from months-old Easter stock; six frozen dinners, and three cans of chunky-style soup—by no means should it have been a load too great to bear. But the four blocks to the discount supermarket and back, in the already-getting-too-warm heat of mid-morning hadn’t helped Owen’s mood, or his back. With nothing more than a setting of his teeth, Owen took the first set of stairs in the apartment building gracefully. Those were always the easy ones. Easy-ish, anyway. After all, Owen had travelled a split set of nine plus nine every day of his working life at the office. While he hadn’t had to trek that journey with two ba
