Dawn woke at 5:47 AM on a Tuesday. The trailer was cold—the radiator hadn't worked since November, and it was now June. She turned off the alarm and lay there for three minutes, staring at the ceiling stain that looked like a map of a country that didn't exist.

At 6:30 she was at the Winn-Dixie, stocking cans in aisle seven. Peaches in syrup. The kind of work you could do with your eyes closed. She did it with her eyes open.

Rick was her memory of a blue shirt. He had worn it on a Tuesday eleven months ago, the day she first noticed him. It was a flannel shirt, faded blue, the kind that comes loose at the shoulders because the person wearing it doesn't take care of himself. He was on the assembly line at the parts factory. She was in the warehouse, stacking boxes of brake pads. They existed in the same building for eleven months. He never noticed her.

She wrote about it on the back of grocery receipts. Not in a diary. A diary was too formal. Receipts were honest. They recorded transactions. What she was doing was a transaction of sorts: she was trading ink for feelings, writing things down so she wouldn't have to carry them in her head anymore.

He came in wearing the blue shirt again, she wrote on one receipt. He brought a sandwich today. Egg salad. He ate it alone in the break room. He asked me if I could help him fix his sleeve. His left one's coming undone.

She helped him. They sat in the break room after the shift ended. She threaded a needle. His arm was close to hers. She could smell the beer on his breath. He had a cut on his knuckle—Big Tab, his father, had done that. Big Tab came to the trailer once, drunk, kicked the door, left. Dawn called the police. The police came, sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes, left. Rick didn't know this happened. He never asked.

The sleeve was fixed in three minutes. Rick said thanks and left.

The next week, Rick wasn't back at work. The supervisor said he moved to Indiana. Dawn didn't ask why. She went to the thrift store one Saturday and saw a blue shirt in the window that looked like his. She didn't go in.

A customer asked her if she wanted to get a beer after work. Dawn said no. The customer didn't seem surprised. Dawn rang up his items. The total was fourteen thirty-seven. She said have a good one. The customer left. Dawn went back to stocking cans.

She didn't write on the receipt that day. The back was blank. She folded it and put it in her pocket and went back to work. The peaches in syrup needed restocking. She did it. The fluorescent lights flickered. The rain started on the tin roof. It sounded like nothing. It sounded like everything.

She would keep stocking cans. She would keep going home to a trailer that was always cold. She would keep writing nothing on the backs of receipts.

That was the story. That was all of it. The blue shirt had been washed and donated and probably worn by someone else by now. Rick was in Indiana, probably working at another factory, probably drinking, probably calling his father on Sundays even though his father kicked doors.

Dawn stocked cans. The total was always something. The day was always long. The rain always stopped eventually. She went home.