Chapter 5: The Customer

I drove four hundred miles in the dark, with my lights off for the first mile.

I was behind the hardware counter again by Monday noon.

For four days I told myself that Frank had written down the wrong plate.

On Wednesday a very big man walked into the store in a feed cap and a canvas jacket.

He stopped inside the door and stood there, filling it, while the bell finished ringing.

I knew his shoulders before I saw his face.

Rudy Matula took off his cap and held it in front of him with both hands.

"Ma'am," he said. "I need a sack of oats."

"Aisle three," I said, and did not move.

The owner was stacking paint cans by the window with her back to us.

Rudy did not go to aisle three.

He looked at me across the counter, a long, miserable look, and his nostrils moved.

I have known Rudy since the third grade.

He was the boy who would not step on a snail.

He has carried half the caskets in the Lodge for eight years and still says sorry to the families at the grave.

"I get that all the time," I said. "I look like somebody."

"Yes, ma'am." His throat worked. "You look like a girl who carried our mail."

"I wouldn't know."

"No, ma'am."

He did not say anything for a while.

On the shelf behind me the little radio played a ranchero song about a truck.

"I'm not going to say I didn't see you," he said at last, very low.

"I can't do that. But I'm not going to grab you either."

"Does Anton know you're here?"

"No, ma'am. Anton can't..." He stopped, and I watched him swallow the rest.

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