“Please don’t get the boy upset, sir,” the supervisor said in a curt little voice as if she was exhausted with Asher. Asher wanted to tell her to kiss his ass. He had never told anyone that in his life and had rarely even had the thought.

Kathi offered Asher a job at her store, Hoskins’ Grocery, where they had shopped his whole life, and he took it. The store was small and always held the scent of lemon Pine-Sol and overripe bananas. There were only three employees including himself and Kathi. The other one was Cherry Sizemore, who staffed the register and conducted his training.

Cherry had recently dropped out of high school to have a baby but had worked at Hoskins’ since she was fifteen years old. She had the palest skin he’d ever seen—intricate networks of blue veins plainly visible in her temples and wrists—and was tiny but her belly had started to become very rounded. One evening when she lifted the green smock over her head to hang it in her locker back in the break room he had accidentally caught sight of her bulbous navel peeking out from under the hem of her shirt.

“I’m only eighteen weeks but already my belly button is poking out and so sore!” Cherry said in her cheerful way, tugging at the edge of her blouse.

“I’m sorry,” he said, ashamed he had seen this private part of her, but she thought he meant he was sorry for her pain.

“It’s just part of it, I reckon,” Cherry said.

He had known her since she was a white-haired little girl playing in the mudholes of the church parking lot after services. Cherry’s mother had kicked her out for getting knocked up and now she was living in a trailer park across the busy highway with her older sister. She walked to work and back every day, one hand on her belly as she eyed the traffic, waiting to cross. Justin had always had a crush on her.

She taught Asher how to stock the shelves, how to change out the merchandise so that the newest stuff was always at the back. She taught him how to run the little handheld machine that printed out UPC labels for the shelves. She even taught him how to run the register, although he was to do that only in emergencies. “That’s usually my and Miss Kathi’s territory,” Cherry said, in that sweet-as-hard-candy voice of hers that made Asher think how he couldn’t understand anyone—especially her mother—kicking her out on her own.