He came in searching for something long enough to no avail that one of us stepped in and he loudly announced he was looking for eggs. He stood before the fridge for a long time, comparing the differences in colour, size, quantity and price. It seemed to him that a dozen large white eggs was the right choice, since the medium felt lowly. He cashed out—counting his change before he indifferently walked away from the register and out of the automatic doors of the heavily air-conditioned store, returning to the sticky heat of high summer. He returned a few minutes later, claiming that he had dropped the carton when someone honked their horn at him the parking lot and that a few eggs had cracked, he was cupping yolk in his free hand. Rather than replace the broken eggs he was given a new carton and told by one of us to be careful. He returned the next day as soon as we opened and said that he had gotten the wrong eggs, adding that his wife said the recipe called for medium-sized eggs, and this time we had to do a formal exchange with all the paperwork—he refused to show us his driver’s license—because it would mess up the future order for medium and large eggs. We thought that would be the last of him, even though at the back of our idle minds was the suspicion he would return, an intuitive response that would prove to be astute when, in the afternoon, he returned saying that in actuality the recipe called for medium brown eggs. We tried to tell him that to best of our knowledge there was no difference between white and brown eggs, that it was merely a matter of the hens’ feathers. This time he agreed to show his driver’s license, having perceived the fact that his repeated appearance had taken on the burden of an inconvenience, that rather than customer he could now only be conceived of as a pest with the potential for extermination. In the evening, a few minutes before we closed, he came with a carton missing three eggs from it, which is wife had used to make the quiche, and wondered whether he could return it, since the eggs no longer served a purpose. We said no and he walked out with the carton which one of us claimed to have seen being thrown inside the trash can outside the door. The next time we saw the man with the eggs inside the store we worried that he was back to continue this narrative, to find another way to complicate a simple thing, but, instead, he said: I am looking for a wife.
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