It’s around one in the morning when I step into the shop. I’m there to get a dozen because it feels like I haven’t in a couple days. Plus, earlier in the day I saw my roommate Bruce wearing his beige cardigan, which only goes on the days he’s feeling beige. I said, “What happened,” when I walked into the apartment, and he said he’d rather not say. It’s probably something to do with the economy. It gets to him sometimes—you know how the economy can be. I mean, I don’t. So, a long john or two’s the best I can do for him.
Good thing is they’ve got the best in town. Who knows, maybe even the world. I have not done the proper research, nor will I.
The place is empty, like it usually is this time of night. There’s only the old lady who runs it standing behind the counter. She’s about five feet big. Sort of built like a bear, as in she’s got this giant muscle-hump rising out of her back the way grizzlies do, to overturn large rocks and perform maulings on hikers. It keeps getting bigger, but I’m probably here too often to accurately say.
She greets me the same way she’s done for the past thousand or so times, in that she doesn’t. Just eyes me with the permanent scowl or someone who’s seen, taken, probably given, and definitely smelled more than her fair share of shit. I’ve used the bathroom here before. Once, and never again. That forsaken place is a testament to man’s cruelty. Well, his inability to aim.
She doesn’t say anything. She never says anything.
This is a lie actually. I’ve heard her speak or make noise two different times, not counting sneezes and coughs, or labored breaths. The first time she spilled some hot coffee on her arm, and that made her say gah. The second, she mishandled a donut and dropped it frosting-side down (such is the fate of most dropped donuts) and had to stoop over and toss it. She said gah this time as well, but a little softer, a little more drawn-out. A gah of disappointment.
I request a dozen, please. She puts on a glove. After each donut I choose—and I know well enough to name them off quick—she shoots me this fish-eyed glance as a she places it in the box, as if to say, “Nice choice you fucking piece of shit.” This is customary as well.
She goes to ring me up, and this is probably the most difficult part. I’m pretty sure she hates if you pay cash, even if it’s exact change. The counting gets on her nerves, I think. But then she also hates if you pay with card, since that means she has to turn around and swipe it through the machine that doesn’t usually work until she instills fear in it with a swift blow from her palm.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if you walked out of the place without paying, if she’d hate you any more or any less.
It’s not something I’d ever try, but others have.
I wonder if she put up a fight that time a year or so back when some people drove their pickup through the front entrance, looted the register and reversed out of there with half the display case lodged in the bumper’s teeth. All I know is she didn’t get injured, so said the news reports I read. Not that she could have been injured. Had she been standing out in the front wiping trucker breath condensation off the glass, I’m sure she’d have stood strong as a traffic bollard, peeled herself out of the wreckage and beat those scoundrels into a fine flour-like powder, then sifted that powder into that industrial stand-mixer that’s always squealing in the back, added the other ingredients and made the next day’s batch.
I decide on cash, eight bucks and thirty-two cents as it runs. Had it on stand-by.
Go to drop it on the counter, and it’s here that she shakes her head. Hard, like she’s trying to fight off flies and doesn’t want to use her arms.
This is a new gesture for me so I’m frozen. My heart’s in my throat, which isn’t where it’s supposed to be. The money slips out of my hand, the coins clinking on the counter. She scoops it all up, places it on top of the donut box and slides it towards me.
“What’s the meaning of this,” I finally work up the courage to ask.
She reaches below the register and digs out a small piece of paper and a hole-puncher and clicks it.
She then holds the paper in front of my face. It reads That Owl Lookin Prick, and it’s got a bunch of puncture wounds. Too many to count in the short time it flashes in front of my face.
“Every dozen dozen ya get a free dozen,” she goes. Imagine if boulders could speak, her voice is how they’d sound. Like how I’d imagined it in my dreams.
I don’t feel like a simple thanks is going to properly communicate what I’m feeling so I tell her, “I love you,” instead.
When I tell Bruce about this whole thing fifteen minutes later, he asks me if she said it back. The cardigan has slipped off his shoulders after a couple johnnies, and he’s got me in a headlock, and everything’s back to normal.
I say, choking on a mouthful of donut, “She didn’t have to.”
Dan Pobereyko lives in Marquette, MI, where he slings pies for the local pizza truck. He also writes words for the baseball-themed blog All Talk, No Balk!