Soli Deo gloria
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Monk. Or the name of Volvo.
Hallmark's been marathoning seasons of Monk and you know I'm all about that :D
Sharona sighed, leaning her head against the driver's window of her Volvo. It'd been a nice long day on a case: a guy was found murdered in a public park's fountain; Monk had ruined her prettiest shoes by making her wade in all the spare change for one particular Euro; she could feel Stottlemeyer's and Randy's simultaneous sympathy and loss of respect for her as she also felt her self-dignity slip away, as it often had the habit of doing when working for her boss. That in addition to being late in picking up Benjy from school and her Volvo making a new weird thumping noise made her want to go home and stick something frozen in the microwave so she could just flop on the couch and groan.
"Except there's nothing in the freezer," she muttered to herself.
Okay, now Monk was staring at her weirdly. Okay, he was not allowed to do that, not him. "What was that, Sharona?"
"There's nothing in the freezer. I haven't been to the grocery store in forever," Sharona said. "I've been busy, between you, Benjy, and the criminal class of San Francisco. I just haven't had the time."
"Do you need to go now? We can stop on the way home," Monk said.
Sharona donned the weird-look-giving everyone else had fallen into the habit of doing today, like it was some kind of new trend or something. "Adrian, I take you many places. Strangers' houses, courthouses, people-crowded beaches, and even the sewer. I am not taking you to the grocery store."
"Why not? That sounds like the most normal of any of those places," Monk said factually.
"Yeah, that's why." Sharona stopped at a red light and said, "It's normal, and if I take you there, you're gonna make it not normal. I'm fine with my idea of strangers' houses and sewers being not normal, but you can't ruin the grocery store. Not that, okay?"
Monk, silent for a moment, touched the open door lock on the passenger's door. Then he said, "But I need groceries, too."
Sharona heaved a heavy sigh and almost gave Monk a heart attack as she took a dangerously wide left turn towards Benjy's school. "Fine. Fine, you know what? You win. We're gonna go pick up Benjy and go grocery shopping and just turn every place in my life into a cringeworthy memory, how about that?"
"I'm as excited for it as you obviously are." For all the abnormalness Monk owned, his sense of sarcasm ran on the same frequency as Sharona's.
Sharona wisely shut her mouth and didn't say anything as they spent fourteen minutes behind all the other parents' cars for Benjy. He finally appeared with his skateboard under his arm, his backpack slumped on his back, his baseball cap backwards, and his red-marked book report in his hand.
Sharona unlocked the back and he stepped in. Settling in, he just noticed Monk with them. "Why is Mr. Monk here? I thought you said you were done at work."
"I'm taking Work home right now, hon. How was school?" Sharona pulled them out of the lane as Monk waved into the front mirror at Benjy.
Benjy merely handed up his report. Sharona glanced at it, to the detriment of her driving.
"Um, Sharona, that's a red light. . ." said Monk worriedly.
"A C+? Did you study for this?"
"Yes, I did, Mom!"
"Well this is just unfair then! You did your best; you just don't do book reports that well; they're too subjective."
"Sharona, it's a RED LIGHT!" Monk shielded himself but the Volvo went through it without getting so much as a scratch, which quite frankly was something of a miracle.
"The book was really boring. I wish I could just not read at all," Benjy said.
"Hey, reading is good for you. It improves you. See me? I'm reading all the time," was Sharona's front-seat parenting.
"Yeah, gossip magazines," Monk whispered into his hand as he looked out the window.
Sharona glared at him. "What was that, Adrian?"
"Nothing."
"What was that? You want to go home? You want to stop lecturing me about my personal life, as if you have a right to do that, when you barely have your personal life together? Sure, let's go home and just skip grocery shopping—"
"Sharona, I'm sorry. You know me, I gotta say what I see. If I don't—" Monk looked pleadingly at her.
She thawed a little and shook her head. That was true. That complusive side of him—if he had something to say, it was easier to walk across the continent on foot than to get him to keep it to himself.
They pulled up onto the cracked surface of the grocery store parking lot. It sat in a shared strip mall and didn't inspire the words 'upper-class'.
Sharona yanked her keys out of the ignition and said, to her side and to the back, "Don't embarrass me. I gotta keep showing my face around here; it's the grocery store nearest my house."
Monk and Benjy shared a look that meant 'We better. Or else.'
Sharona and Benjy waited impatiently at the front of the store as Monk spent his sweet, sweet time side-stepping all the big cracks on the asphalt from the various earthquakes San Francisco had its share of. "Any century now, Adrian," Sharona said with a distinctly lackluster impatience.
Monk overcame this hurdle in less than five minutes and into the depths of hell they stepped. Sharona grabbed a grocery cart from the few scattered around the lobby. Monk visibly cringed as she gripped its handle with determination and dove into the belly of the beast.
He grabbed a sanitizing wipe from a little display and coming up to her side in the produce section, held it out to her. "Where'd you get that?" she asked.
"Don't question it, just use it." He pointed to the metallic grocery cart, with its chipped paint and rusty spots. "On that." He nodded to her hands. "On them."
Sharona pursed her lips and made a grand show of thoroughly wiping down the grocery cart handle and her hands. She threw the wipe dramatically away in a little trash bin by the disposable produce bags and said, "Happy, Adrian?"
Actually, "Yes, I am."
Sharona resigned herself to the fact that this entire trip would be this physically painful as she trailed through the produce department with a man who had to make all the produce-weighing scales perfectly zeroed out and a kid wearing headphones and beating up 8-bit villains on his video game.
She pretended she cared about healthy food by grabbing some bananas and some of the .99 cent/lb apples. She picked up a couple of salad mixes and putting them in her cart, noticed that her bananas were gone. "Adrian!" she said, as she found him perusing the selection of bananas as seriously as any crime scene. "What are you doing?"
"You picked a bunch with six dark spots. Also, they were a bunch of five. An uneven number."
"I can live with the dark spots and the odd number, Adrian."
Monk cocked his head to the side. "Yeah, but I can't."
"Yeah, but they're my bananas. They're gonna be in my house and not in yours, so they won't bother you." She grabbed a bunch which had a significantly large dark spot on one of them. Monk raised his hand but Sharona's murderous eyes and cocked head for once silenced his tongue. "Pick out some perfect bananas for yourself, Adrian. In the meantime, I'll be in the canned soup aisle."
Thus their trip through the long, long aisles proceeded in like fashion, with little variation and a whole lot of repetition. Adrian kept his items in the top part of the basket where the kids usually sit (after it being thoroughly sanitized threefold—every time Monk said, "Do you think the kids had just had a diaper change?" Sharona broke out a sanitizing wipe and make the cart as germ-free as an operating room) and made sure they didn't touch. He'd counted exactly twenty asparagus spears and found the most perfect apple they'd three ever seen—after only seven minutes of concentrated searching.
Sharona, meanwhile, could only care so much as she threw in frozen dinners, individual frozen burritos, and 12 packs of soda into her cart. They rattled together in a great haphazard mess as she marched down the aisles. She could've gotten out of that store in less than fifteen minutes if not for the fact that Monk needed to stop every five feet to do something weird. He had to arrange all the canned green beans behind the right price tag by barcode; he had to touch all the little machines that printed out coupons that hung off the shelves. Sharona dragged him away from a display of candy boxes all jumbled together with a sign "2/99 cents" on it or else her half-gallon of milk would get room-temp by the time he'd meticulously organized it.
"All right, that looks like everything. I didn't bring a list but I bet the moment I get home I'll remember something I forgot," Sharona said.
"What a problem to have," Monk said absentmindedly, looking over his shoulder.
"Yeah, I bet it's a problem you never have," Sharona said.
"Unfortunately, I haven't. I remember everything," Monk said, still not looking Sharona in the eye.
Sharona watched her boss for a few seconds; he kept looking over his shoulders, concentrating on something, something he couldn't get his mind off of. She said quietly, "Do you need to go touch the big red button for service at the meat counter?"
"Yeah, do you mind?"
She waved a hand. "Go ahead. We'll be right here."
She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen Monk run so fast.
Sharona sighed and took out her checkbook and calculator to do some grocery shopping math. Benjy looked up from his video game and said, "How long do you think it'll take him to get back?"
Sharona wanted to say something sarcastic, as she could practically feel her half-gallon turn temperature, but she settled with a calm, "If he's not back in two minutes, we'll go looking for him."
Somehow he made it back within two minutes, and their next hurdle presented itself:
"Okay, a register or self-checkout: which should we do?" Sharona said conversationally. Then she put up her hand and said, before Monk could say whatever he was about to say, "Register, definitely register."
"What's that supposed to mean, 'definitely register'?" Monk said, sounding a little hurt as they stepped into register 2's line.
"Adrian, I love you, but if we go into the self-checkout line, you will insist on ringing up everything yourself or it won't be perfect and you'll be bothered," Sharona explained. "And that will literally take an hour."
Monk worked a little crick in his neck out and agreed. "True."
"See, if we go through a register, the cashier does all the work and you won't do anything," Sharona said. "See? It'll go by much faster."
"But it won't be perfect."
"No, it won't. But it'll mean that my milk won't be warm by the time I get home."
"So we're going to leave all our groceries in the hands of a stranger who's been touching other people's groceries? Sharona, cashiers ring up raw meat and wet produce and—and you're buying milk? UGH!" He looked away, shielding his eyes.
"Oh, yeah," Sharona said, throwing her jacket over the milk. "Sorry, my bad. I forgot."
"I wish I could forget but I can't." Monk shook his head.
"I'm just trying to make this as painless as possible, Adrian," Sharona said as calmly as she could.
"You say that but then you're buying milk! Ugh, right in front of me." He put his hands to the sides of his head and shook it, blinking his eyes as if to rid himself of the image in his head.
"Adrian, look," Sharona said, her apologetic voice forcing him to look at her, "I'm sorry. I've just been in a mood all day. I forgot. I'm sorry. Okay?"
He couldn't not forgive her. She was Sharona, who stood by him through thick and thin; even when she thought she could forget him by quitting she was always by his side. "Okay," he said.
"Good. Now, let's get home. Benjy"—she gave her son an eyeful—"has to study, I gotta cook dinner, and you need to read up on this fountain/park case, okay?"
"Okay."
Checkout was less painful than expected. The line quickly moved, Monk organized the gum boxes so they were all displayed evenly instead of oddly, and Sharona took it on herself to put all the items on the conveyor belt herself. Benjy took the end of the register and bagged everything in paper bags. When Monk peeked into his bag he looked at Benjy with pride. "Couldn't have packed it better." Benjy grinned at his mother, who gave him a very decided nod of approval.
They three walked back to the car together, their arms laden with paper bags. Benjy and Sharona shouldered three each while Monk could only be prevailed on to carry one more besides his own. "Two is even, three isn't," he said.
"Well, that went better than I thought. I only spent forty bucks and my check didn't bounce!" Sharona gave Monk a smile. "You're getting better about that, Adrian. I'm proud of you."
"Yeah, good job, Mr. Monk," Benjy said helpfully.
"It's progress, I guess," Monk said, even as he had to stop and push two carts (after thoroughly wiping their handles down) into their corral instead of letting them run wild in the parking lot. This time, though, Sharona didn't give him a hard time. She and Benjy just waited patiently for him to lower the entropy in the world before resuming their plod back to the Volvo.
For the day being such a nice long one, in the end, it was a nice day. Monk might be the biggest pain-in-the-butt boss in the world, but Sharona wouldn't know what to do without him. He could also say the same about her.
Thanks for reading!