The Feed Store Reunion

The feed store lot was mostly empty at a quarter to six, just the dusty spots where the fair trucks had parked all week and two flatbeds pushed off to the side. Louis swung the rig in slow and took the space nearest the road, same as he always did, same as he had told himself for eleven years he did because of the pie across the street.

He climbed down and checked the delivery sheet. Four pallets of cattle feed for Murphey Feed and Seed, signature required, and the name on the account was J. Alvarado. It had been J. Alvarado for six years now, since the paperwork changed hands.

The lights were still on inside. He could see her through the window, at the counter, going through a stack of invoices with a pencil behind her ear. Fifty-two now. He looked fifty-two too. They had both been twenty-two the last time anything had happened between them, thirty years ago, and that had been one kiss behind the gym at the fairgrounds, and then his company had moved him to a long-haul route and so it ended, or so he had told himself for about thirty years.

He pushed the door open. A little bell rattled.

"Well, look who it is," Jacinta said without looking up. "Four months late."

"Route changed. They got me going up through Corden now."

"Mm. And yet here you are, going down through Murphey." She looked up then, and she had that smile, the slow one, the one that made him feel like she had been expecting him since 1994. "You want to sign here, and then you can help me get these off your truck, since your company sent them two days late and my brother already had to drive to Corden for backup stock."

"Your brother drove to Corden?"

"He did. He was thrilled about it, as you can imagine." She handed him the clipboard. "Scott still with you?"

"Waiting at the diner. He knows the routine."

"Everybody knows the routine by now, Louis. The pie at the Rusty Spoon is famous in three counties." She tapped the counter. "The pie, sure."

He signed and said nothing, and she laughed and came around the counter. She was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and her hair was going gray at the temples, and he thought, not for the first time, that she looked better than anybody he saw on any road in any state.

* * *

They got the four pallets off with the pallet jack and stacked them in the back room, and it took twenty minutes because he moved slow on purpose and she pretended not to notice. When it was done they stood in the lot in the cold, and the sky was doing that flat gray late-autumn thing where it could not decide whether to rain.

"Fair packed up Sunday," she said. "You missed it again."

"Missed it eleven years running."

"You judged the pie contest one year. You don't remember."

"I remember. I gave the blue ribbon to Doris Klein and half the town didn't speak to me for a month."

"And the other half wanted to marry you." She put her hands in her pockets. "You always come through right after the fair, you know that? Every year. Like you time it."

"I don't time it."

"Uh-huh." She looked at him the way she used to, head tilted, and he knew what she was doing. She had always done that. "You look good, Louis."

"You look better."

"Flatterer. You always were." She kicked at a clod of dry dirt. "So. Diner's got pecan this week, I hear."

"Pecan." He said it like he was reading his own sentence. "Yeah. Pecan."

"You know what's funny? I've watched you do this for years. Roll in, unload, go eat pie, and every single time, you stand in my store and look at me like you're trying to remember something." She was smiling, but her eyes were not smiling the way they usually did. "And I've always wondered what it is you're trying to remember."

"It's not..."

"Take your time. I've got all night. Store closes in ten minutes and my brother took off early." She started walking back toward the door. "Come on, I'll make coffee. You can tell me about the pie."

The store was warm inside and smelled like seed and cedar, and she made coffee in the back on a burner that had been there since before either of them were born, or close enough. He sat on a crate by the counter because he had always sat on that crate, and she leaned against the counter across from him with her own cup.

"Scott says you're thinking about retiring," she said.

"Scott says a lot of things. Two more years, probably. Then I don't know."

"You'll still come through Murphey?"

"I don't know that either."

"That's an honest answer. Rare for you." She blew on her coffee. "You know what I figured out, about ten years back? You don't come for the pie."

"Jacinta..."

"No, hear me out, because I've had thirty years to think about this and I'm going to say it." She set the cup down. "There's something about you. There always was. Back when we were young, I used to say you were the strangest normal man I ever met, and you laughed, and you knew what I meant, and you never once told me I was wrong."

"That's a long time to hold a question."

"I'm a patient woman. Ask my brother." She came around the counter and stood closer than she needed to, not touching him, just close. "So here's what I want, and you can say no and we'll drink this coffee and you'll go eat your pecan pie and nothing will be different. I want you to stay after close tonight and tell me. The whole thing. Whatever it is."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'll be the first one in thirty years to not find out, and I'll live with it, the way I've lived with it since we were twenty-two." She paused. "And if you say yes, I'll ask you what it actually is, and you'll decide how much to show me. That's the deal. No deal, really, just a question."

He looked at his coffee. Outside, the last light was going off the flatland and a truck went down the highway doing sixty, going somewhere that was not here.

"The pie's real," he said. "The pie is genuinely good. But no. It was never the pie."

"I know."

"Scott knows something. Not what. Just that I come through here."

"He's across the street eating chicken fried steak. He'll eat for an hour and then he'll want his six hours of sleep before the morning run." She said it like she had already done the arithmetic, and knowing her, she had. "So the timing works out, if you want it to."

He put his cup down on the crate.

"Lock the front," he said. "I'll tell you."

Her face did something he had never seen it do in thirty years of knowing her, which was go completely still and then open all at once, like a door. She went and turned the deadbolt and flipped the sign, and the little bell did not even rattle.

"Back room's warmer," she said.

They took the coffee with them. She sat on a feed sack like it was a chair and he sat on the pallet he had stacked an hour ago, and the overhead light hummed, and for a while neither of them said anything, which was fine, because they had always been able to do that.

"Start wherever's easiest," she said.

"It's not a story that starts easy." He rubbed his hands together. "It starts with the fact that I look fifty-two, and I'm not."

She did not laugh. She looked at him, that tilt of the head again, and nodded slowly, like a lock turning.

"Keep going," she said.

"All right," she said. "This is why I needed you to say it out loud first. If you'd led with it I'd have argued."

"It's easier this way. I look fifty-two because I let this shape age along with you, a little each year, so nobody would look twice. I've been doing that for a long time. I stopped counting at a certain point because the numbers stopped meaning anything."

"How long?"

"Awhile."

"Louis." She said his name the way she used to say it when he was hedging, back when they were twenty-two and he was hedging about everything. "Numbers. You're good at numbers. You carry freight for a living."

"Two hundred and change," he said. "I don't keep the exact count anymore. Keeping the exact count makes a man crazy."

She nodded slowly and drank her coffee. The burner in the corner ticked as it cooled. A moth had gotten in somehow and was bumping the fluorescent tube overhead, and Louis watched it because it was easier than watching her.

"So you don't age," she said. "Or you age so slow it doesn't matter."

"That's part of it."

"What's the rest of it?"

"You have to understand, I've never said any of this out loud. Not once. Not to anybody. Scott doesn't know. Nobody knows." He turned his cup in his hands. "The road is good for a man like me. People on the road don't look twice. You drive through, you sign papers, you eat, you leave. Thirty years of that and you can almost forget yourself."

"But not quite."

"No. Not quite."

She set her cup down on the concrete beside the feed sack and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "I don't need the whole biography. I need the one thing. What are you? When I stand close to you, like right now, something in me says stand closer, and something else says careful. That's not a feeling you get from an ordinary man who doesn't age."

Louis looked at her for a while. Outside, a dog barked twice and quit. The moth landed on the light housing and stayed there, wings folded.

"Come here," he said. "Not too close. Just to the middle of the room, where the light's weaker. The overhead bulb, it..." He stopped. "It shows things better in the dim. That's all I can say before I show you."

"That's ominous."

"It's meant to be."

She got up off the feed sack and came to him and he took her by both hands, which felt strange and good and familiar all at once, her hands rough from twenty years of pallet jacks and ledger pencils. He walked her back a step, two steps, until they were standing in the corner where the light from the back hallway came in at an angle and the fluorescent hum was far away.

"Don't let go of my hands," he said. "Whatever you see, don't let go. People let go, and then it's a different kind of evening."

"Louis, you're scaring me a little, and I don't scare easy."

"Good. A little is the right amount."

He closed his eyes. He hadn't done this in front of another living soul since before she was born, and he had to find the shape of it again, the way you find a word that's been sitting on the tip of your tongue for years. It came easier than he expected. It always does, he thought. It's just heavy.

The first thing was his eyes. She saw that first because she was looking at his face. They went from a flat brown to something like lamplight through amber, a deep warm gold, and they didn't blink the way a man's eyes blink. Then the shape of him shifted under his clothes the way heat shifts over asphalt on a summer road, a shimmer more than a change, and the outline of his shoulders widened and narrowed and widened again, uncertain, like the room couldn't quite decide what it was looking at. The skin of his forearms, where his sleeves were pushed up, took on a faint pattern, darker lines over lighter, like grain in old wood, or like scale, or like neither, like something with no name in the hardware catalog.

He stayed that way maybe ten seconds. Then he let it go and was just Louis again, fifty-two-looking, standing in a feed store holding a woman's hands.

Jacinta had not let go. Her grip had actually tightened.

"Well," she said. Her voice came out about an octave higher than usual and she brought it back down. "Well. Okay. I need a minute, and I need you to know I'm not letting go on purpose, this is just where my hands live now."

"Take your minute."

"That was you."

"That was a piece of it. The piece that shows."

"What's the piece that doesn't show?"

"That's the piece that doesn't show for a reason."

She was quiet for a second, doing her arithmetic again, he could tell, the same way she'd done the arithmetic on Scott's dinner. Then she said, "The dog outside. Barked twice. Animals. Do animals... because my brother's dog loses his mind every time your truck pulls in, and I always figured it was the diesel."

"It's not the diesel."

"Hah. I knew it. He's not a friendly dog to begin with and he goes nose to nose with your fender like it owes him money."

"They can tell. They always could. It's one of the reasons I like animals and they like me, mostly. We understand each other about keeping quiet."

She finally loosened her grip, one finger at a time, and stepped back and looked at him from arm's length like she was checking a delivery against a manifest. "You're the same," she said. "Same eyes, same hands as at twenty-two, just with the years put on like a coat. That's what I've been circling for thirty years. Everyone else aged and you just... arrived, and kept arriving."

"That's a kind way to put it."