Not Talking to Me

The grocery store doesn’t seem to have the brand of turkey dogs that Katie likes, but I’m lingering by the packaged meats section, hoping they’ll magically materialize. 

“Disgusting,” a low voice behind me says, and I turn to see an older black woman watching me with a sour look. “All this meat, don’t even know what’s in it, killing things, chemicals, disgusting.”

I consider engaging, but after a moment’s thought decide that she wouldn’t care if I was a vegetarian even if she knew, and so I retreat into the white New Yorker’s standard gambit of “they must be talking to someone else."