STRIP MALL

“Late,” Vincent says when I push open the door, clutching my apron and cap.

My boss never misses the time. I check the clock. It’s five minutes after five. It could be much worse. I stash my coat, wrap my hair around my hand and pull it into a ponytail, put on the cap. Clock in. Tie on apron.

Vincent is built low and gorilla-like. He is gruff, tattoos bursting down his arms. If customers ask, he tells them about his tattoos. He designed them himself with symbols from all the cultures he is made up of. A koi fish on his bicep for the Japanese blood, a Celtic cross for the Irish blood, a muskrat he read about in a legend for his Abenaki blood.

“Forgive you this time, babe.”

“Don’t call me that, Vincent. I won’t be late again.”

“Don’t be shy about it. You’re not a California babe. But you’re a babe.”

Jesus, he irritates me so. If it weren’t for the pay.

The Dunkin’ Donuts is in a tiny strip mall with an Asian market that I’ve never been in. Behind it are the city’s only projects, though hardly projects compared to the ones in Lowell and other cities in the Valley. The Valley is south of us, Lowell and Lawrence on the Merrimack River’s banks where European immigrants came for jobs in the mills. Next the Hispanics and the Asians came, like my mother. Like me?

“Hi, what can I get for you?” I ask the customer at the drive-through who is only a voice in my ear. She lists a string of drinks and a dozen chocolate frosted. I fill the box of donuts. Pour the coffees with creams and skim and sugars. Get them to the window. This will continue for hours.

My hair is falling from my cap, and I jam it back under. The cap is beige with a tiny strip of orange around the bill and a cherry-red, orange, and white DD on the brim. I hate the cap. Vincent wears one just like it, plastering his thin hair to his head. He wears it low over eyes that are heartsick like a basset hound’s. I imagine a story of unrequited love that left his eyes so bereft.

A girl comes in, her elbow loose around a guy’s neck and him in jeans hanging beneath his hipbones. The girl wears earrings that dangle and long hair in spirals down to the small of her back. I know this couple likes their coffee with double milk, double sugar.

A tiny woman with pixie hair under a pink beret stares at the trays of donuts.

“Hi, what can I get for you?”

She comes every night. She’s waiting for the time we throw out the donuts that have been on the rack too long. “May I have one of the cream filled?” she asks, very upper class.

“I’m sorry, that’s against the rules,” I say.

We each say this every night. And every night when Vincent’s back is turned I put two cream filled in a paper bag for her. Vincent knows I do this.

Mrs. Bennett goes out with her donuts, easing her way up the sidewalk and through the crush of lights at the intersection of roads to the mall. I brew more decaf. Sometimes people want that at night. When I turn I see Mrs. Tuttle, who wears sequin ducks on her sweatshirt jacket, lean her head in the door. She’s a neighbor from the Heights.

“I know your dad’s a fisherman,” she says. “Do you have any Maine shrimp? I wonder if you’d sell me some shrimp straight from the boat. It’s my husband’s birthday. He is eighty-three tomorrow.” Wind blows her most of the way inside. “I remember when they used to sell shrimp off a truck right here on Woodbury.”

She means northern shrimp, what the New Hampshire fishermen call them. Tiny, sweet shrimp only in these northern waters. And that’s when it comes together for me.

Brilliant.

“I can get you some shrimp for Mr. Tuttle’s birthday,” I say. “Whole shrimp?”

“I don’t mind. Grew up cleaning shrimp. Ned Dickerson’s got a thing going off his boat,” Mrs. Tuttle says, “Whole shrimp. One seventy-five a pound.”

“I can beat that,” I say. “One seventy.”

“Dickerson’s getting a better price selling locally. It’s a lot of work. Like they’re giving out recipes and telling people how fresh tastes better than frozen.” This conversation is happening around the orders coming in through my earpiece.

My head spins with possibilities for profit. And keeping my father home. He gets seventy-five cents a pound for the shrimp going to Gloucester. You don’t have to be good at math to figure out it’d be good to sell to Mrs. Tuttle.

“Couldn’t do it,” Vincent says. He was doing a crossword between jobs back behind the counter. It’s all filled in, in ink, with the tiny black letters, except for one tiny block.

“What’s the question?”

He puts the clipboard away, slides the pen in the metal clip, and shakes his head. “Got standards,” he says. I know the standards. 1: No reference, not even Sofie. 2: No guessing. 3: In ink. Vincent should be running a country, not a donut shop.

I mop, imagining measuring out shrimp for Mr. Tuttle’s birthday. Wash out the pots. Put on my sweater, over the shirt that says DD Oven Roasted, Gets You Running. The floor shines. The traffic has grown lighter outside. The ribbon of lights that crosses the storefront has slowed. “’Night, Vince.” I don’t look back. “Five sharp tomorrow,” he says in his way, and I don’t have to look to see his heartbroken eyes.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s Vincent who wrote on the seawall at the beach in all-cap black letters, You were too beautiful for this world . . .

When I step out, I instantly see him. The soldier is a silhouette, his boot on the runner of my father’s truck, knee bent. I realize later that the command my father gave never crosses my mind.