Grief in the Open

The shop kept his hours without him, which Hesper had not expected and could not seem to stop.

At half past eight on the Tuesday she was at the near end of the counter with a dry cloth in her hand and nothing whatever to do with it. At six she put the mutton on ten minutes later than the mutton required. The docket book sat under the ledger with a line ruled beneath the eighty-eighth entry in the back of a knife and the date written small in the margin, and it was the tidiest closed account she had ever kept in her life, and she had opened it twice in three days to look at a total that was not going to change.

Three hundred yards up the lane a man ate at a long table with nine others and a stool.

She got through the first two…