Untelling

“Soft pack or box?”

She asked it like there was a right or wrong answer.

“Gimme a soft pack if you got it.”

Rayeanne didn’t indicate if she approved of his choice. She heaved the fat of her stomach onto the counter so she could reach for a soft pack of USA Gold Lights from a large plastic cabinet positioned above her. The midday sun was firmly clear of the hill line, now coruscating in thick swaths of light off the gas pumps onto her position behind the register. She flipped her sunglasses down to see good enough to choose the right pack of cigarettes, then pulled them back up to keep her long hair off her face. She’d have known the placement of the cigarettes by heart, having worked at the Fast-n-Fill for going on twenty years after replacing her brother Patrick, but they hired new boys every other month for the third shift, so the stocking was never consistent.

“$5.88.”

Rayeanne eyed the man in front of her, a short and stocky thirty-something worker man in a neon safety vest, as he unfolded neat one-dollar bills. His arms were covered in suntan and thick, dark hair. Behind him to the right, a motley throng of five or six folks blocked an aisle, looking at their phones or chatting. To the left, in the corner, a pinecone-helmeted woman soberly scratched lottery tickets against the blue plastic Kentucky Lottery podium wedged between stacks of pop and the drink cooler. She surveyed the line of customers from her perch, waiting for the right time to jump back in line for more tickets.

A creaking and sizzling advanced from behind her, and Rayeanne reflexively squeezed herself to the left. Patty Ross, mid-sixties, wirey and only slightly hunched over, contrasted Rayeanne’s largeness and relative youth, as Rayeanne’s fat protected her face from age. Patty balanced a heap of soft fried bacon on top of one of them deep metal buffet pans. For a brief moment, as she walked, she passed through the stretch of light burning in through the windows of the gas station and the steam from the deep pan ascended like thick translucent smoke.

Patty opened the backside of the glass heating cabinet that held breakfast foods. She slid the new bacon into an older pile, then dropped the deep pan into place. “Sorry y’all’s been waiting. We’d done run out of gravy earlier.” The throng fell forward in anticipation.

The man in the neon shirt lifted a bank card. “I only had five ones on me. Can I use this?”

“Yeah.” Rayeanne flipped a device around. “Slide it here.”

Patty began to take orders. She opened a styrofoam container and broke up two soft and lightly browned biscuits at their thick cloud centers and then smothered them in white cream gravy and pieces of spiced sausage glistening with oil and pricks of red pepper. She closed it and turned to the next person.

Rayeanne handed the worker man his receipt. Patty was already ladling out another order.

The man hadn’t moved.

Slight irritation welded together Rayeanne’s next words. “Buddy, you need something?”

The man purled his head around like he was checking to see who was paying attention to him. Most folks seemed worried about food. He twisted his fingers together. “Yeah. I was wanting to know if, uh, if you might wanna go do something sometime with me.” His gaze oscillated, starting up at her face and then down to the receipt in his hand as he spoke to her, like he might find some revelation or answer between the date, location, and sales tax.

Rayeanne shifted her weight and stepped forward, away from the light, so she might size him up easier. She liked that he didn’t mind making people behind him wait. She just said, “Depends. You ever consider switching to Marlboro?”

Before he answered, the entrance on the other side of the gas station blew open, the one behind the counter, and a giant man, easily closer to seven feet than six, came into the door frame. Standing halfway in, halfway out, he hollered up onto the oval platform that separated the workers from the customers. “Patty, you working?”

Patty, layering a plate with paper towels so the ham and cheese rolls she was packing up wouldn’t slide in their oil, didn’t turn away from the customers, but answered, “Yeah. What you need, Little George?”

“There’s a whole flock a young’uns out here praying in the parking lot in a circle. Something going on?”

She shook her head and closed the container. “I ain’t heard nothing. But hell, might be the End of Time as far as I know. It’d be my luck, too. I just cussed out this pan of gravy little bit ago.”

The lottery ticket scratcher lady edged herself up against the front door, the one in front of the registers, and peered with her hands above her eyes. She spoke with authority, waving her arm downward as if to say there was nothing to see, “Why, that’s just them folks from that church up Ice Plant.”

Reassured, the giant entered the store and clomped towards the coffee. The lottery woman started towards the end of the line of customers. The man with the receipt was still looking at Rayeanne. Rayeanne spoke flatly. “I’ll think about it. I’m here bout every day. Come ask me again sometime.”

The man nodded at her, looking satisfied with her answer, stuffed his receipt and cigarettes into shirt pocket, and headed out. Patty served up food and Rayeanne rung up customers. When the line was cleared and the lottery ticket scratcher woman took ten one-dollar scratch-offs off to her corner, Rayeanne declared she was taking her thirty-minute break. She filled a container with breakfast foods, grabbed a pop, and stepped outside. She didn’t see anybody praying, kids or otherwise, just the same old parking lot and the same old cars and the same old customers she always saw.

She sat at a wooden bench perched out on the grassy area near the bathrooms. Behind her was the road that led towards the cut-through and out of Mosely. In front of her was a long and unending span of hills that rose into the sky like old fences, so many trees crowding together that they bled through each other and ceased to be separate, just a skin of green and brown dividing town from sky. In front of them, the old high school, the Dairy Queen, and various houses, trailers, businesses, and buildings stretching out as far as she could see, which in the winter was as far as Fox Creek, but, with the green swell of summer swarming the landscape, was just a doublewide trailer in the distance opposite the mouth of Ice Plant holler.

Rayeanne watched the parking lot flood with people. An old bald man and a woman with a giant purse fought at each other while a patch of young’uns cried to leave the backseat. A woman with short purple hair on a motorcycle was buying gas for herself and another lady in a taupe SUV. A woman with big blond hair walked out with three bags of ice. A skinny man in a tight pink shirt pulled up in a new truck and talked across rolled down windows to a couple of young men in a thirty-year-old, four-door sedan; the feller in the passenger seat kept his eyes towards the road. Rayanne ate. She had two biscuits sweating butter and ripped into thick chunks, a half dozen strips of chewy pepper bacon, two soft fried eggs with bright yellow yolks. Everything was smothered in thick white gravy. She chewed each bite until the flavors merged into something pure and meant to be together, relishing the harmony of flavors. She washed it all down in heavy swigs of full-sugar neon green pop.

She was only halfway through her break when she heard hollering from the store entrance. The lottery playing woman was standing in front of the door, looking at her. “Hey, sissy. You almost done? She’s done got a line backed plumb out to the coffee machines.” The lottery playing woman threw her head back in the direction of the coffee machines as she spoke, and the sun fluttered across the silver frames of her old eyeglasses, which glinted around her head like a cheap halo.

“Yeah, I’m coming.” Rayeanne rubbed her finger through the last vein of gravy swiped against the side of the container, then licked it off, holding it on her tongue for a moment to consider it, and in her contemplation looked lost either in prayer or devotion. She swallowed, then tossed the empty container in the trash by the door as she went back to the store, sacrificing the second half of her break to relieve her overwhelmed colleague.