eighteen dollars
and forty-one cents.
He counted out the bills
the way a man counts out bills
in a town where the bank
still knows his grandfather's name,
slowly, without hurry,
laying each one flat on the counter
as if it were a small page
of a book he had written
and did not want her to read
too fast.
She gave him his change.
She said, See you Wednesday.
He said, See you Wednesday.
And he went out
into the cold
that had not improved
and would not improve
and that was all the news.
Outside, the snow began again, the way snow begins in this country — not falling so much as simply being there, as if it had decided sometime in the night to stay, and was now only revealing itself. The feed store sign swung on its chain. Somewhere on the edge of town a dog was barking at nothing, and a man was answering it, and neither of them meant to stop.
By noon
the first week of the year
had settled into itself,
the trucks had gone
and come back,
the dog was still barking
or had been replaced
by another dog
with the same argument.
The widow ate her lunch
at the counter,
a sandwich
and a thermos of soup
she had made Sunday,
and between bites
she watched the door
and noted, without writing down,
who had not yet come in
this week
and would, she assumed,
come in before Friday.
Earl Nygaard
she had already seen.
Ray Hollander
she was waiting on.
Hollis
would come
on a Thursday
if he came at all,
because Hollis had always come
on a Thursday,
even in his better years
when Thursdays
were harder to get to.
Dale, the pastor, drove past the store twice that afternoon on separate errands and on the second pass he raised his hand without honking, which is the accepted greeting of a man who does not want to disturb a shop from the inside of a car. The widow saw him both times and nodded back the
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.