I nod. I can feel the sugar crystals dissolving on my tongue. Everything sweet. I run my tongue over my teeth.

The woman still comes alone during the week. But now I notice what I hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes are red-rimmed like my father’s last time I saw him, months and months ago. Cirrhosis had made him all blood vessel, bloat. But the woman is not all blood vessel or bloat, though her hands tremble each time she picks up a shoe to inspect it.

I watch her from my counter right across from the shoes. She always makes it a point to come to my counter even when she doesn’t buy something. But she is forgetful and often buys the same product she bought a day before or returns something she already has. She apologizes so often I begin to call her Mrs. Sorry to myself.

I see the woman during the holiday season, after Mario loses his job. I see her the week one of the clinic doctors catches Mario slipping pills into his shoe. He paces the whole week, yelling and throwing things. He knows he won’t be arrested, because the authorities are already starting to crack down on some of the clinics, inspectors and whatnot, all political he says, which means nothing to me but to him means he won’t be arrested because the clinic won’t call the cops.

But still. He’ll become a patient now, he’ll need to pay for the bottles and doctor shop, just like everybody else. The profit margin smaller. I ask my mother for a little more money so we can invest it, and she asks for what and I say I need new clothes, for work. And I tell Mario I am getting money from my mother, thinking that will make him feel better, one less problem, one way I make things better, and it does a little.

He hugs me and tells me I am the best thing to ever happen to him and it’s so hard for me to let go of that warm cologne embrace, needing this, wanting this so bad.

But the woman: she is back with her husband and they browse the shoes and she does not come to my counter. She just passes by and we make eye contact. We both smile at the same time.

I don’t know when the twenties become forties. I barely notice when the forties become eighties. I do remember my first. Pale pink in my hand, like a tutu, like the one I wore to my dance recital in second grade. Or like the houses in my subdivision, or guava juice from a can, or dusk when the sky eats the sun and traffic stalls and I don’t make it home until pink turns to red, red turns to black.