If you found yourself in a car in which she was riding and someone suggested rolling down a window, she’d say, “Some fresh air.” Or you’d pass a guy riding a horse and she’d say, “A horse.” If someone, goading her slightly, asked, “You like horses?” she might say, “Well, they are pretty,” and if that person, goading her further, asked if she’d like to someday own a horse, she would, because that possibility was so out of the question (she didn’t make much at the store and rented half a duplex), just go quiet and blink, blink, as if something happening outside her cage had startled her into stillness.

Of course, one day she fell in love. He was a man she worked with at the store. I can see her now in the brown apron they gave her. I don’t imagine he had given her any romantic signals, but they were there together every day and likely he did for her the sorts of small kindnesses people do for one another when working with one another and in time she decided he was the one for her. She started dropping his name. “That’s what Randy thinks too,” she’d say, or “I said that same thing to Randy the other day.” We imagined that Randy thought about her the way we did; that is, in his early days of working with her, he’d waited to discover what might be special or interesting about her only to find that she didn’t have, as the expression goes, much to recommend her.

She always seemed to be reading directly from a book on how to be most common. “Are those apples fresh?” someone would ask, and she’d say, “I suppose they are pretty fresh.” “Was that an earthquake just now?” someone would ask, and she’d say, “If it was, it will be on the radio.”

Then came a change. Because she was in love, or fancied herself to be, with Randy, and because, I expect, she could feel that not only did he not feel the same way, he didn’t feel much about her at all (and why would he, given that she was, as mentioned, experienced by most people as a slightly puzzling blankness), she started, perhaps, to panic a little, to sense, maybe for the first time in her life, that her natural way of being was not interesting enough to get the attention of (much less delight or captivate) someone like, even, Randy, who, I should say, was no font of originality himself but at least had a big truck he loved and would wash with pleasure every Friday after his shift and sometimes would at least make a dirty joke or pick up a strange-looking damaged orange and do the funny voice in which he imagined such an orange might speak, and was, for example, a passionate advocate for, and defender of, his mother, a mean old thing who lived a few houses down from the store, a strongly self-certain lightning bolt of constant opining who presented as a fierce pair of black men’s glasses moving around on a tanned, agitated face.