Your attention shifts back to the girl now, who, when you really give her the once-over, can’t be more than twenty. Twenty-two, tops. Definitely out of school, high school, anyway, but this is probably her first job. Real job, at least, if you can call sitting on a stool and writing up sales receipts by hand on a pad of lined paper a “job.” She doesn’t even have a cash register, you note, just one of those metal boxes that has a handle on it and a slot in the front for a little key. More like a child’s toy than a proper space to house the cash of a working establishment, but that’s the kind of place this is. Seems to be, at least, in a town like this one. Not that you should expect any more than this, though, as you well know. These communities up here—cities and towns and villages—that make up this part of the state are pretty rustic. And that’s being generous. A thought like this can easily lead you back to wondering why your parents would ever choose to retire up here, whether they bought property near the lake back in the sixties or not—dirt cheap, as the old man is proud to say at every family gathering—so you drop it and go back to browsing through the stacks of comic books and CocaCola bottles. You promise yourself that this is the last summer that you’re going to make this drive again—you’ll buy them a pair of cheap tickets online next year and fly them down to stay with you—and leave it at that.