She’s sixty-three, has worked at Hollis longer than I’ve been alive, and proudly considers herself Millbrook’s unofficial newspaper.
“You look exhausted,” she said when I entered.
“Lovely to see you too, Lori.”
“Those shadows under your eyes are practically luggage.”
“How flattering.”
She laughed and handed me a cup of coffee.
“Drink this. Mike says the delivery truck is running late, and we’re short on stockers.”
Mike Delgado manages our store.
He’s a large man with a gray beard and reading glasses he constantly leaves pushed onto his forehead.
He always sounds irritated.
But I’ve watched him quietly buy groceries for customers who were short on money.
Once, during a snowstorm, he drove nearly an hour to deliver medication a coworker had accidentally left behind.
He has a generous heart.
He just prefers pretending otherwise.
“Hale,” he called when he spotted me. “Register three. Lori’s covering two.”
“Understood.”
I went to my station.
Counted the money.
Cleaned the conveyor belt.
Checked the receipt paper.
Then I looked at the small photograph taped beneath the scanner.
It was a picture of my father.
He was standing beside his enormous blue Peterbilt truck with his arms crossed, grinning as though someone had just told him the funniest joke in the world.
His baseball cap was pushed back.
He wore his old brown work jacket.
And on his wrist was a silver watch with a dark face and a worn leather strap.
My mother had given him that watch for their tenth wedding anniversary.
She’d saved nearly a year to afford it.
It was the only expensive possession he ever allowed himself.
Dad died when I was twelve.
There had been black ice on Route 9.
It was a March night, and he was driving home earlier than expected because
