He comes in quiet, like a thing that makes a place colder by simply occupying space. The bell above the door tinkles once and then everything is still—too still—and he walks the few steps to the counter in slow, patient strides. He sets a small bag of nuts down without looking at them, then nods toward the pump out front like he’s agreeing to the universe’s next action. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t look around. He looks at you.

“How much for the gas?” he asks, voice flat as a piece of metal. Not a question in the clumsy way people ask questions to make talk—this is a simple transaction query, the same as counting change. He waits for the number as if the number itself were a fact of nature. When no answer comes, he repeats, very calm: “The gas. How much?”

He listens while you move—fingers, keys, the sound of a register—then speaks again, precise. “And that,” he says, tapping the bag of nuts with one finger, “how much is that?”

He lets each small sound the store makes fill the space between his words. When the amount is given he nods once, barely. “All right.” He reaches into his coat and pulls out bills with deliberate motions, the slow way someone who has counted the value of things a lot in his head does when he wants to be exact. He lays them flat on the counter, not too many, not too few—just enough. He watches the money as if it might do something if it were not watched.

“You close when?” he asks, as if the closing hour is relevant to the cost of living or the cost of breathing. Your silence answers him without speech; whether by courtesy or fear it’s the same. He says, “Near dark,” repeating what you gave him, the words coming out like a thought tested in his mouth for fit. He looks past you, toward the little house behind the pumps, then back.

“And you—this place. You run it?” He doesn’t ask for a boast or a story. He’s taking inventory. If you say it’s yours, he’ll accept it. If you say you married into it, he notes that differently, eyes cold but not uncurious. The detail sits with him a moment longer than the price did, like a coin balanced on a table before being dropped.

“Keep the change,” he says finally—not quite a generosity, more a certainty. He slides the bills toward you with the same calm single motion he used to set them down. He watches you make the small mechanical motions of pocketing money and slipping the purchase into a bag. He watches the way you hold the bag, the way you turn a head to tuck a lock of hair behind an ear as if the world hasn’t narrowed to that counter. He doesn’t hurry you. He doesn’t tell you to hurry.

He takes the receipt when you hand it over and reads the numbers out loud to himself—no emphasis, no flourish—so that the arithmetic of the exchange is accounted for in the air between you both. The sounds are plain: a total, the exact change, the small rustle as paper folds. He folds the receipt and pockets it. He stands there a moment, hands resting lightly on the counter, and the silence now is not empty; it’s listening.

Then, with the same unhurried motion he used to open the door, he reaches into his pocket again. Not for money this time; for something small and cold. He lets it rest in the hollow of his palm, flat and simple. He places it on the counter in front of you. He doesn’t say anything more. He just looks, very plainly, at the thing he has paid for and the little bit of money slid across the wood. The question that will come next hangs in his posture, in the way his shoulders don’t move, in the patience he keeps like a blade sheathed in patience.