Park Mart

Park Mart is a twenty-four-hour store that gives Auden and Eli’s late-night wandering a destination, and gives ordinary errands an unusual span of time. It is at once a practical retail space, a quiet refuge from family conflict, and a landmark in Auden’s changing relationship with night. Its recurring presence links the early hours she spends with Eli to the later routines and memories she carries away from Colby.

Definition and Setting

Park Mart is open around the clock and sells an expansive mix of goods: groceries, linens, and small appliances, with tire rotation also available. Its scope makes it more than a conventional grocery stop. At three in the morning, after leaving the Laundromat, Auden and Eli can travel fifteen miles west and still find a working commercial world waiting for them. The contrast between the hour and the store’s breadth is part of its character: while much of the town is presumably asleep, its aisles remain available for shopping, conversation, and simply being somewhere together.

The store is presented through concrete actions rather than a detached description. Auden and Eli walk its aisles with a cart between them; Eli compares microwave-popcorn brands and examines a box, while milk is later pulled from a shelf and placed in another cart. A cashier whom Auden has come to recognize appears at the register, looking up from her magazine and smiling at Eli. These small details make Park Mart feel like a place with routines and familiar faces, even when the hour gives each visit the quality of an excursion.

Nighttime Visits with Eli

One early visit follows the Laundromat. Eli drives an old Toyota truck with a cab, its back filled with bike parts that clank and rattle at every turn, and takes Auden to Park Mart during their roaming night. The pair talk as they shop, but not about Abe. The distinction matters: the store becomes a setting where they can spend time together without making grief the subject of every conversation. Their shopping is ordinary, but its timing and companionship make it part of Auden’s unfamiliar experience of staying awake and being out without a productive academic purpose.

In the aisles, their conversation turns to Defriese and Maggie. Eli asks whether Maggie is going there, then praises her intelligence and extends the compliment to Auden. The exchange makes the store a setting for a particular kind of attention: talk moves from a familiar third person to Auden herself, and Eli’s praise reaches her without becoming a formal declaration. Park Mart’s ordinary activity—the comparison of popcorn and movement between shelves—holds the conversation lightly, allowing intimacy to emerge in the middle of an errand.

A later Monday-night visit takes place at one thirty in the morning. Eli puts milk in the cart while the two shop in a store that is nearly empty. For Auden, the quiet is welcome after a two-hour family dinner that turned into an argument between her father and Laura about capital punishment, following debates about university funding and environmental policy. She experiences the evening’s disputes as a replay of her parents’ strained marriage, with someone else occupying the role of her mother. Park Mart offers a sharp counterpoint: here, there is no crowded family table or escalating debate, only an almost deserted shopping space and the quiet movement of the cart.

A Waypoint in Auden’s Changing Nights

Park Mart becomes so established in Auden’s mental map of the night that, on an evening when she stays in her room to study instead of driving around with Eli, she imagines where he might be. At midnight she thinks of The Washroom; by one thirty, she places him at Park Mart; beyond that, she cannot know. The imagined itinerary shows how the outings have become a shared pattern even in her absence. The store is not just a stop on a single adventure but one of the fixed points through which she understands Eli’s hours and their developing connection.

The contrast is especially clear because studying feels safe to Auden. She returns to her economics textbook and notes, while the new, challenging activities she has shared with Eli lie outside her comfort zone. Yet even while she studies, she checks the time and wonders about his whereabouts. Park Mart thus represents both the life she has chosen not to join on that particular night and the companionship that continues to draw her attention. Its familiar place in the sequence of late-night destinations makes absence legible: without Auden’s quest to manage, Eli could be elsewhere, and she cannot follow the route from the room where she has chosen to remain.

Memory and Afterlife

Park Mart also reappears after Auden has left Colby for school. During one of her first outings after arriving there, she sees an item at the local store and puts it in her cart without thinking. The item is associated with Thisbe, and the passage connects it to the sound of waves—especially fake waves—which Auden’s roommate Maggie can tolerate once in a while. The text does not identify the object more precisely, but its function in the memory is clear: an ordinary purchase carries a trace of the baby Auden has left behind and of the summer they shared.

That recollection gives Park Mart a quieter significance than its nocturnal shopping scenes. Earlier, it is part of the active route Auden and Eli make through the night; later, it supplies an object that brings Thisbe into Auden’s new surroundings. The store’s practical abundance—its shelves and carts—allows an unplanned purchase to become a durable reminder. Across these appearances, Park Mart links movement and attachment: it is a place one can visit in the middle of the night, a point in a routine Auden learns to anticipate, and a source of something she carries into the life that follows.