In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

SHOWDOWN
After that Penny saw neither Ula nor Sandro for nearly a
month. Testing, she would yell up at the ceiling. She telephoned him at
different hours but his phone was disconnected. Ula did not answer
anything, mail or phone. Exasperated and somewhat worried, she called
Ramón. He had no idea where Sandro was but had seen Ula with Dick
and Beatrice early that morning, when he parked her car while they
went upstairs.
That was really odd. Dick out and about with Ula early in the
morning was a possibility, but Beatrice? Never sober these days, she
rarely was out before late afternoon, when Penny occasionally spotted
her lurking around the Soho boutiques. Penny called their business
phone, as she didn't have their home or cell numbers, but got the
answering machine and Dick's professional design voice.
Next Monday, market day. She elbowed her way through the
crowd―wizened old women, flocks of sturdy matrons, thin chain
smoking hustlers, Buddhist nuns pulling faded plaid shopping carts,
their eyes on the ground, except for a sharp size up of the available
bounty. The bins overflowed with every assortment of edible material,
from fresh to mummified. Some had dry stuff, alien lotus pods, roots
with gnarly attenuated limbs, and piles of shrunken shrimp, flattened
dry squid and salted fish and just behind them a box spilling a galaxy's
worth of star anise, others with colorful mystery beans, spices. Then
there were piles of bundled wilted leaves, variants of cabbage, mostly,
and various fragrant and pungent exotic fruits. In plastic buckets swam
slabs of tofu and pods of fresh lotus root. So Penny bought some of
those, then asparagus, ginger root, a handful of star anise, a baggy of
five spice powder, a garlic bulb and a variety of greens for a hearty stir
fry.
She opened her door and there he was sitting at the console
with the headphones on.
"You're back!" she dumped her bulging knapsack on the
counter. "Where the hell have you been all this time?
"I see you stock up," he removed the phones and spun around
to face her. He'd ditched the wedding ring.
She didn't know what to do, so she stood in front of him and
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