Chapter 12: The Grocery Store
Three days passed before I saw David Rose again.
Three days of the Roses arguing in their motel rooms, loudly enough that Stevie started keeping headphones at the desk. Three days of Moira demanding accommodations that didn't exist and Johnny trying to negotiate with a reality that wouldn't negotiate back.
I kept my distance. Helped when asked, which wasn't often. Watched from enough distance to observe without interfering.
Then David started working at Brebner's.
I learned about it from Twyla, who'd heard from Wendy, who ran the general store and had apparently needed a bag boy badly enough to hire someone who'd never bagged anything in his life.
"He's very..." Twyla searched for words. "Committed to the aesthetic of suffering."
"That bad?"
"He told a customer her grocery choices represented a 'cascade of nutritional failures.' She was buying vegetables."
I filed that away with everything else and waited for the right moment to witness what I needed to witness.
The moment came on Thursday afternoon.
Brebner's General Store occupied a corner of Main Street with the tired dignity of a business that had survived by refusing to change. Fluorescent lights. Vinyl floors. A produce section that suggested vegetables were a rumor from more prosperous times.
I entered needing actual supplies—light bulbs, cleaning solution, the mundane necessities of motel maintenance. What I found was David Rose standing at the bagging station, wearing a sweater that probably cost more than the store's weekly revenue.
His expression was magnificent. Not anger—that would have been too simple. This was something more complex: aristocratic horror filtered through forced compliance, creating a hybrid emotion that existed only in the purgatory between wealth and work.
A customer approached the register. David watched her place items on the belt with the intensity of an anthropologist observing an alien ritual.
"Paper or plastic?" He said it like the question caused him physical pain.
"Paper, please."
David reached for a paper bag. The motion was wrong—too tentative, too delicate, treating the bag like it might bite. He opened it with excruciating care and began placing items inside with the spatial awareness of someone who had never considered where groceries went after purchase.
I watched from the supply aisle, pretending to compare cleaning products.
The customer left with a bag that looked like it had been packed by someone having a nervous breakdown. David stood alone at his station, staring at the empty belt like it represented everything wrong with his life.
I could help.
The thought surfaced automatically. I could distract Wendy. Create a reason for David to take a break. Spare him five minutes of humiliation.
But I didn't move.
This moment mattered. I remembered it from the show—not this exact scene, but scenes like it. David's journey started here, in the wreckage of everything he'd taken for granted. Without the humiliation, without the forced confrontation with a world that didn't care about his designer wardrobe, he'd never become the person who could run Rose Apothecary.
Meta-knowledge isn't just about knowing what happens. It's about knowing what needs to happen.
Another customer approached. David's face reset to professional misery.
That's when he spotted me.
Our eyes met across the store—the transmigrator watching from the cleaning supplies, the fallen prince suffering at the bagging station. I saw recognition flicker through his expression, followed by something darker.
I was Roland's son. I'd carried his luggage. I'd seen his family at their lowest point.
And now I was watching him bag groceries.
The glare he sent me could have frozen the produce section. I nodded—respectful, neutral, acknowledging without intruding—and turned back to my supplies.
You'll understand someday, I thought. You'll understand that this moment was necessary.
But he wouldn't understand today. Today, I was just another witness to his humiliation. Another person who'd seen David Rose at his worst and done nothing to help.
That's the cost of knowing, I realized. You have to let people suffer through the suffering that makes them better.
I gathered my supplies and headed for the register. A different cashier—not Wendy, some teenager I didn't recognize—processed my purchase while David stood at his station, radiating fury at a universe that had betrayed him.
I didn't look at him again. Didn't acknowledge the obvious tension between us. Just paid for my light bulbs and cleaning solution and walked out into a street that felt heavier than before.
The walk back to the motel took me past the storefronts I'd memorized, the people I'd filed away, the small details of a town that had no idea what was coming. David's face stayed with me—not the anger, but the underneath of it. The fear. The helplessness.
He's going to hate me for a while, I thought. That's fine. He needs to hate someone. Better me than himself.
Stevie was behind the desk when I dropped off the supplies.
"You look thoughtful."
"Saw David Rose at the grocery store."
"Ah." She nodded. "Twyla mentioned. How bad?"
"Bad. But survivable."
"Most things are." She went back to her magazine. "The Roses have been quiet today. I think they're finally accepting this is real."
"Acceptance is the first step."
"Toward what?"
I thought about Johnny Rose, surveying the motel with businessman's eyes. About Moira, adjusting to an audience of one. About David, suffering at a bagging station, learning what work actually meant.
"Toward whatever comes next."
Stevie didn't respond, but I caught her watching me as I left. That look again—the one that said she was trying to figure out what had changed inside the person she thought she knew.
Let her wonder, I thought. The truth is too complicated to explain.
Outside, the motel sign flickered in the fading light. Six rooms functional now. A family in crisis slowly settling. A town on the edge of transformation it couldn't see coming.
I walked past Brebner's on my way back to the barn. Through the window, I could see David still at his station, still suffering, still refusing to give up. The rage had settled into something harder—determination, maybe, or at least the refusal to let this place break him.
Good, I thought. That's what you need. That's what the journey requires.
Tomorrow there would be a town council meeting. Moira Rose would attend, because she'd heard there was an audience, and she never met an audience she didn't want to dominate. The first collision between Rose ambition and Schitt's Creek inertia would begin.
I kept walking, carrying the weight of everything I knew and couldn't share. The hardest part of meta-knowledge wasn't the knowing. It was the watching—seeing people struggle through pain you could prevent, trusting that the struggle was the point.
David would forgive me someday. Or he wouldn't. Either way, I'd made my choice.
The barn was cold when I arrived, but I didn't mind anymore. Cold was just another texture of this life I'd fallen into, this body I'd grown to fit, this world that had become mine whether I'd chosen it or not.
One day at a time, I thought, making terrible coffee by lamplight. One conversation. One repair. One moment of watching without interfering.
That's how you help a town that doesn't know it needs help.
The night settled around me, quiet and patient, full of possibilities I was learning not to force.
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