The small parking lot was empty. He lowered his bicycle to the ground and pulled the screen door through its quarter-circle in the dirt. Up front, behind a long, grooved wooden counter, sat Ida Paine, the hawk-nosed, farsighted proprietor of the store. Stacks of cigarette cartons filled the shelves behind her-red-and-white Lucky Strikes, aqua Newports, desert-colored Camels. From somewhere, a radio droned out the news from the AM station in Ashland. Edgar raised a hand in greeting. Ida returned the gesture in silence.
He and Ida had a long, though stilted, acquaintance. He could remember his father carrying him into the store when he was barely a toddler. Though Ida had never yet said a word to Edgar, he never tired of looking at her. He liked especially to watch her hands as she rang up purchases. They moved with an agile independence that made him think of tiny, hairless monkeys. Her right hand slid dry goods down the counter while her left hand danced across the keys of an ancient adding machine. And Ida, unblinking, looked her customers up and down, her pupils magnified to the size of quarters through dish-lensed spectacles. After each entry, her left hand slammed the adding machine lever down hard enough to stamp the numerals into a piece of oak.
The locals were inured to all this, but strangers sometimes lost their wits. “That it?” she would ask when she’d totaled their items, cocking her head and fixing them with a stare. “Anything else?” The veiny digits of her left hand punched the keys of the adding machine and leapt onto the lever. Thump! The thump really startled them. Or maybe it was the head-cock. You could see people stop to think, was that really it? The question began to reverberate in their minds, a metaphysical conundrum. Wasn’t there something else? They began to wonder if this could possibly be their Final Purchase: four cans of beans and franks, a bag of Old Dutch potato chips, and half a dozen bobbers. Was that it? Wasn’t there something else they ought to get? And for that matter, had they ever accomplished anything of significance in their entire lives? “No,” they’d gulp, peering into Ida’s depthless black pupils, “that’s all,” or sometimes, “Um, pack of Luckies?” This last was issued as a question, as if they had begun to suspect that an incorrect answer would get them flung into a chasm. Cigarettes often came to their minds, partly because Ida herself smoked like a fiend, a white curl always streaming from her mouth to rise and merge with the great galaxy of smoke wreathing over her head. But mainly, when the uninitiated stood before Ida Paine, they found themselves thinking that the future was preordained. So why not take up cigarettes?
When something Ida didn’t know the price of landed on her counter, her right hand would pick it up and twirl it until she spied the white sticker with its purple numerals, and then she would glance at a yellowing index card taped to the counter and say, without emotion, “On sale today.” She never declared the price. Edgar listened for these asides. On the drive home he liked to match the stickers with the numbers on the adding machine tape that came with their purchases. Sometimes, the numbers all added up; more often everything was scrambled. He’d once gone through the exercise of totaling up the stickers himself. Though none of the individual numbers was correct, the total had been exactly right.
He walked along the farthest aisle, past the canned milk and SpaghettiOs and the cereal. There was nothing he wanted, really, and he didn’t have much money, but he dawdled. The plate-glass window facing the road admitted less light than a person would have guessed, and the gloom only increased farther back. He half expected to find spiders spinning webs in the darker recesses, but that was the thing with the Popcorn Corners grocery-at first glance it seemed disheveled and broken down, but when you looked closer, you found clean and neat. The rear of the store was a butcher shop, the domain of Ida’s gaunt, aproned, white-hatted husband. When Edgar was little, he’d entertained the notion that Ida’s husband lived behind the meat case among the grinders and cutters and the scent of chilled blood and flesh.
Bottles kept catching his eye, especially smaller bottles. He picked up a bottle of fingernail polish remover and carried it for a while. He knew of only two uses for it-the second was to kill butterflies, an act he’d seen performed but had never done himself. The idea reminded him of Claude and Epi and the Prestone. He picked up bottles of saccharine, bottles of syrup, bottles of corn oil, and hefted them and set them down again.
At last, he returned to the front counter. Ida stood with her back turned, twisting the radio’s antenna as the speaker hissed and crackled. Then she turned and centered him in her black pupils. He pointed at the soda case outside and she nodded. Her left hand groped toward the adding machine, paused over the keys, and withdrew. He expected her to ask her question, but all she said was, “Nickel for the bottle.”
He dropped a quarter and a nickel into her palm. She stopped cold for a moment, blinked, then turned and dropped the coins into the cash drawer. Outside, he lifted a bottle of Coca-Cola from the red cooler and pried off the top using the zinc bucktooth of the opener and watched the soda fizz. Clouds had appeared in the blue sky during his ride and now they’d begun to clot, turn dark. The breeze carried with it a vestige of spring chill.
The window sash by the cash register slid up. Ida Paine’s face appeared gray behind the screen.
“You miss your daddy,” she said. “He was a good man. He came in about a week before and I got a feeling then. Nothing certain. Happens all the time. Someone hands across corn flakes, soup-nothing. Then they’ll hand over some little thing and I’ll get a jolt off it, it’s so loaded up. It’s not a message. People will tell you it’s a message, but they’re wrong. What it is, you pay attention to it long enough, you can start to read it. Read the juice.”
Through the screen he could make out the shape of her face, the glint of her glasses, the stream of smoke fluttering up from her nostrils.
“Some juice feels good,” she said. “Some juice feels bad.”
He nodded. There was hot and cold lightning.
“What can you do?” she said. “No one knows when something like that’s going to happen. Weight of a coin can make all the difference. Man came in once, told me how he’d nearly died except for the change in his pocket, change I’d made for him the day before. Something about that dime being just the right size to turn a screw, and without it, he’d’ve been lost.”
She didn’t expect a response, he knew that. He stood waiting for her to go on and thought about all the times he’d watched Ida Paine’s left hand hop over the keys of her adding machine.
“When your daddy came in that last time he bought milk and eggs. That’s all. I rung up the milk same as any day, but with the eggs there was so much juice it was like a hand grabbed me when I touched them. I dropped the whole carton on the floor. He went back and got himself another one. I was half afraid to ring it up. And I had this powerful feeling-almost never happens-that I should charge your daddy more for those eggs, not less. More, you see? But I can’t do that. People get mad. But your daddy, he looked at me and said, ‘Here’s for both.’ I should have taken the money. That would have been the right thing to do. But I said, no, that it was me that dropped them, and I wouldn’t charge for both. And that time, the total rang up two dollars, even-steven.”
She was silent for a long time.
“Even-steven,” she repeated. “That was the last time I saw him. I should’ve come, but I couldn’t. To the funeral, I mean.”
Then she tipped her head and looked at Edgar one-eyed, a primeval bird in its cage. “Child,” she said from the gloom, “come in here and show me what it is you brought with you.”