Madeline worked her usual Friday night shift at the grocery store. She’d been working there the past two years, almost forty hours a week to try to pay for school. And even working that many hours couldn’t pay for it all, which meant she still had loans. Thousands and thousands of dollars of loans. She started out bagging groceries, and then the manager came along one day five months earlier and told her she was being transferred. To the deli. The manager needed someone over there, and she thought Madeline would be perfect for it.

“You’re fast and efficient,” the manager said. She was about fifty, with three kids and two grandchildren and a husband she helped support even though they were divorced. “And you have brains, unlike most people I’ve tried over there.”

Madeline went along with the change because it came with a fifteen-cent-an-hour raise. But she hated the work. Slicing meat, then weighing it. Trying to tell the difference between something called “pickle loaf” and something called “olive loaf.” Customers forgetting to take a number and then trying to cut the line. The perpetual fear of the meat slicer taking off the tips of her fingers, leaving her unable to write. Going home every night smelling like a butcher shop.

The hairnet.

But it was a job. And it was money. It really embarrassed her only when a professor came in. Like Dr. Nye, who showed up once and ordered a half pound of cheese and a pound of ham. He looked so sad, and she imagined him sitting alone in his house eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and missing his family.

She wanted to go home with him and try to make him feel better. Talk to him. Or make him a real meal, even though Madeline didn’t cook and struggled to boil water for instant mac and cheese.

That Friday night in August, when the students were just starting to come back to town en masse, she showered and changed at home and then headed to the Owl’s Nest, the concert venue downtown. Live music every night of the week. And dollar beers. PBR or something like it, but she didn’t care at all. A local band that had kind of made it, the Sharpshooters, was playing. They’d been on Jimmy Kimmel once, and that had been a big deal. Then the lead singer left and they never went on TV again, but they still played around Gatewood with a new singer, and everybody turned out like they were Vampire Weekend or Cage the Elephant. Madeline wondered what it was like to be so close to achieving a dream only to see it all fall apart. Was it better to have that little taste than nothing at all? She thought about these things when she wrote. And lately she’d been writing and writing, trying to get her thesis going and not having much luck.