When Martha was fifty-four, she put on one of her mother’s dresses because hers didn’t fit her anymore. She looked in the mirror and thought she looked very familiar, just like her mother, so she sat down and put on powder from the little round flat thing with the cracked mirror, then tried lipstick. Her lips didn’t match so good when she tried to rub them together like her mother used to do, and the lipstick smeared on one side. She took a tissue and started to rub it, and suddenly a little face looked back at her from the mirror. A younger face, with darker curls, a girl with a lump of a nose that hooked to the side, surrounded by fat red scars. The girl had traced the scars in lipstick and mother was removing it with a tissue and a scolding. Mother was crying, and Martha didn’t understand. Then the vision was gone, and Martha went to town.

She went to the bank first, where they all knew her. She asked for twenty dollars and they gave it to her. The pretty girl in the window told her she looked nice, and Martha repeated it to her. “You look nice today,” she said. She took her crisp bill and went over to the general store and bought what she always bought. Milk, yeast, flour, sugar, and root beer. The 4-H kept up a garden at her house which provided all the vegetables she wanted. Especially carrots. She loved to pull up the carrots, all warm from the sun, wipe the dirt off on her dress, and eat them.

Mr. McRae, pleasantly scrubbed and mostly bald in his white apron, was always smiling. “Good morning, Martha. How are you today?”

“Look nice,” Martha said.

“Yes, you look very nice today. Do you want the usual?”

“Flour . . .” Martha said, ticking off finger number one.

“Yes. Wait just a minute and I’ll get it all for you.”

Martha waited, looking at all the shiny jars with the colorful striped sticks inside. Mr. McRae returned with a sack full of groceries and set them on the counter.

“What do you do with all this flour, Martha?”

Her face screwed up in listening intensity. “Bake bread.”

“Freshly baked bread, eh? Do you eat it all?” He glanced at her bulk.

“Chickens gotta eat.”

“You feed the bread to the chickens?”

She looked at him blankly. “Chickens gotta eat.”

He leaned over the counter closer to her. “I’ll tell you what, Martha. I’ll give you some real good food for the chickens, and you bring me the bread you bake, okay? And some fresh eggs?”

“You want bread?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “I’ll buy it from you.”

“You want eggs?”

He nodded again.

She laughed, a rasp, horrible in its lack of practice, her poorly sewn-on nose crinkling redly. “I get bread. I get eggs.”