He always found a solo shift more pleasant, but there was one advantage to having company, in that he was nearly always offered food.

He chalked it up to a maternal urge on the part of his coworkers, who were almost always women north of sixty, which he had always shamelessly courted, although of late the shame had certainly been less absent that he would have liked.

There was a food stall down the street, and he and Cheryl stood in the window over a display of somewhat-shabby women’s shoes and dollar-store Christmas decorations and watched the line grow longer and longer, until she announced that she was too curious not to waste her entire break standing in that same line to see what all the fuss was about, despite the cold. She asked him if he wanted anything and he, as he always did, told her he’d appreciate bringing him anything that looked good.

Alone in the empty store he watched her bright purple overcoat join the queue, and then he looked at nothing at all, eyes unfocused over the slushy sidewalks. True, he was always putting on a face at work - even more than most retail employees - but generally the cheerful smile of that face had at least a germ of sincerity in it. He felt old, exhausted, like no one’s son no matter how Cheryl and the rest thought of him, and the nicotine patch on his arm was an itchy reminder of how badly he wanted a cigarette, having abandoned his thousandth attempt to quit only long enough to get the cravings back.

His habitual gesture was to smooth his mustache with his thumbs, and as he did so he considered why he had ever grown the damn thing in the first place, as the reason was a memory - like so many others - lost to him now. He felt sure that it had been some desperate attempt to make him feel like a Man rather than a Boy, but if that had been the effort, it had not worked. He didn’t feel like either - didn’t feel like a person at all, most days, but a series of fictions strung together with a general amiable deference to the current of happenstance. There was, as always, the twinge of bitterness at having no childhood to recall. Maybe if he shaved he could coast on lying about his age by a few years, but the thought had the kind of nerves in it that Cheryl might feel if someone suggested she wear a miniskirt to work. It wasn’t wrong, but it was so - vulnerable. Exposed. Maybe he could grow out his hair or get glasses, or something -

The thought was interrupted by the return of the woman herself, flipping the “back in fifteen” sign on the door and handing him a styrofoam container out of a plastic bag, wafting something delicious-smelling.

“What’d they have?” he asked, cracking the lid and giving it a sniff when the pile of brown food yielded no clues as to what exactly it was.

“All kinds of things. I asked them what they’d recommend for yours, so I don’t know what it is. Hopefully something good,” she laughed.

They took their first bites in companionable silence, standing still at the window to watch the people in line, and he looked back down at the food, startled by a sense of familiarity and a sudden wave of longing for something he couldn’t even name.

“Oh,” said Cheryl, with a little sigh. “Tastes like home, doesn’t it?”

He glanced over at her, and was taken aback by a sudden youthfulness in her face. She had been pretty once - he had already known that, because she liked to show off photos from when her children were young - but she looked pretty now, and younger, as she indulged a second bite with her eyes closed.

He felt a sudden impulse to look in a mirror, and did his best to see his own face in the window glass instead. It showed him nothing but the stranger he always saw there, and he hazarded a second bite - and a second wave of nostalgia fitted around the blank space in his head - only to be disappointed in his hopes of seeing a corresponding youthfulness sweep over him.

Maybe the youthfulness instead was in a sudden childish urge to cry, which he fought back with effort that nearly choked him.

“Yeah,” he said, keeping the thickness out of his voice and prodding the mysterious food with the end of his plastic fork. “It does.”

It would be nice if I could remember why, he thought.