It has been a hard year on a fixed income. Everything costs more than it used to, and my little pension does not stretch the way it once did. That afternoon I was at the grocery store with a small basket — bread, milk, a few tins — and when the total came up, I realized I was going to be short.
So I did the thing I dread. I stood at the register and counted out coins from the bottom of my purse, one by one, my face hot, painfully aware of the line of people building up behind me. The young cashier, a girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, waited patiently. She didn’t sigh. She didn’t roll her eyes. She just watched me quietly with a look I couldn’t quite read.
The line behind me was the special kind of quiet that is louder than complaining. A man shifted his weight. A young mother studied the candy display. And I stood there with my little stacks of coins on the counter — dimes with dimes, quarters with quarters, the way my mother taught me — feeling every one of my seventy-nine years, wishing the floor would open politely.
I want to say something about that girl, because I have been on the other side of enough counters to know. She could have called a manager to hurry things along. She could have done the sigh — you know the sigh. Instead she counted along with me, out loud, gently, like we were doing it together. “Thirty-five, sixty, eighty-five…” Like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I came up a little short in the end and had to put the tin of soup back. She rang the rest through, bagged it, and wished me a good evening with a smile that seemed to mean something more than the usual. I thanked her and shuffled out to the bus, embarrassed and tired.
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