Tamara reached over and, very lightly, touched his hand.  “I’m sorry.”
   He hoped she’d leave her hand on his.  But when he looked down, she moved it.
   “I forgot to buy dryer sheets,” he said.  “I just did the laundry.”
   She smiled.  “Do you have a job?”
   “Not for a few years.  I needed to take care of my mother.”
   “That must have been hard.”
   “No, it was okay.  I liked it, you know.  It was an honor.  And sometimes I think her getting sick kind of saved my own life.”
   She asked what he had done before his mother’s illness.
   “I played in some bands, and then I did security work for some other bands.  Mostly, I bought drugs for them.  And for myself.”
   “Anybody I might know?”
   “You listen to any metal?” he asked.
   She shook her head.  “My ex-husband liked Pantera.  Some of their stuff was okay.”
   “Dimebag,” Serge said.  “He was amazing.  But I didn’t work for anybody that famous.”
   Serge had started shooting heroin with the bassist for the last band that employed him.  They’d forged checks up and down the east coast to support their habits until the lead singer’s mother noticed the band’s financial straits and had the two of them arrested.  It turned out she was an accountant.  Serge’s own mother had to cash out an insurance policy to pay for his attorney.  She’d just been diagnosed with brain cancer.
   Tamara asked if he was going back into security work.
   He shook his head.  “Honestly, I like the house work.  It makes the day go by fast.”
   She laughed again.  It seemed like a nervous gesture to Serge.  But she had a pretty smile and soft pink lipstick with an icy shine.  He wondered if someone had told her a long time ago that she needed to smile more often.
   “Seriously,” he said, “there’s a beauty to doing something that nobody else sees.  I quit caring what other people think.”
   “Well, that’s nice,” she said.  “But what about money?  Did your mother leave you anything?”
   “The house.  It’s paid for.  But I don’t think I can pay the city taxes.  And then the funeral, headstone, some medical bills.  I need to sell some stuff for cash.  Furniture, things like that.”
   She pulled a pack of chewing gum from her jeans. “Why do I like this gum so much?” she asked.  And then she offered him a stick.
   “Thanks.  I’ll chew later.”  He slipped the stick into his jacket pocket.  “After the coffee.”
   “The reason I asked about money,” she said, “is we’ve got a service/cashier position open.  It’s not security, but it’d be nice to have somebody in the store who could handle the kind of stuff that happened today.  This wasn’t the first time.”
   She unwrapped a piece of gum and slid it into her mouth.  She pushed her light hair behind her ears.
   “And if you want small tasks that nobody appreciates,” she said, “I’ve got plenty of those for you.”
   Serge had thought a lot about drinking the past few days.  There wasn’t enough to do around the house.  The walls heckled him, called him a fuck up and a retard.  They wanted him out.  He’d punched two holes in the dry wall above the sofa and then left them to fester.
   He asked his mother once, early in the cancer, why she wanted to live so badly.  It was right after his detox and jail term, and he couldn’t see any good reasons for either of them to move forward.  She only smiled.  “I’m scared of dying,” she said.  “And I like talking to you every day.”
   Serge was scared, too.  And so he told Tamara the job might be a good idea.  “I’ve been thinking about what to do,” he said, “but I wasn’t expecting a real job opportunity.”
   “I wouldn’t call it a great opportunity,” she said.
   “You don’t know the other things I was considering.”
   “Think of it as an open door,” she said.  “Maybe it’ll lead to a real opportunity.  Something better.  That’s how I like to see this place.”
   “It’s a nice store,” he said.  “Well stocked.  Better than the RITE AID on Phillips Street.  They never have the Pantene Classic Clean over there.  It’s crazy.”
   Another smile.  He enjoyed his power to move her lips, even if he did understand that it was a habit.  His relationship to the store had changed.  He’d never noticed that the boxes of antihistamine were so bright.  Packaging made everything, even nasal wash, look like a present.
   “I’ll get you the paperwork after we’re finished with the cops,” she said.  “It’s just a formality, though.  You’ve got the job if you want it.”
   Serge nodded.  Neither of them even mentioned the hourly wage.