“Just take the apples off,” she whispered, her hands shaking so hard she dropped three dimes on the black conveyor belt. She didn’t look at me, but I was staring at the yellow mark under her ear.

I have worked register four at the Route 6 discount grocery for nineteen years.

You stand behind a black belt that long, you learn to read a face like a bad map. My name is Carol. I am sixty-three years old, I have bad feet, and my blue vest has a little yellow name tag that says, Happy to help.

Most days, the most exciting thing that happens at register four is someone trying to use an expired coupon for fifty cents off laundry soap. But you see things. You see the ones who are stretching twenty dollars until Friday, and you see the ones who are hiding.

This girl came in every Tuesday at ten in the morning. I started calling her Clara in my head, though I didn’t know her name yet. She couldn’t have been twenty-five. She was always thin, always looked like she hadn’t slept in a week, and she had a little boy in the cart who was about two.

That child was the quietest thing I have ever seen. He never cried, never reached for the candy bars, and never made a sound. He just sat there, clutching a small blue plastic tractor, watching his mother’s face. Every single week, Clara would count her change.

She would set things back on the belt. A bag of cheap apples, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of white bread. She would whisper an apology, and I would pretend it was no big deal. But I noticed things.

I noticed the way she jumped every time her phone buzzed in her pocket.

I noticed the yellow-green mark along her jaw that she tried to cover with foundation that was too light for her skin. When she saw me looking, she turned her head quick. “I bumped the cabinet,” she said, real fast. People say they bumped the cabinet the exact same way.

I have heard that phrase forty times in my nineteen years at this store. It is always the cabinet, or the car door, or the closet. It is never a person. I kept thinking about her after I went home to my empty house on Maple Street.

My husband Earl passed five years ago, and some nights the silence in my living room is heavy. I sat there soaking my feet in Epsom salts and I felt a sick kind of guilt. I had let her walk out of my lane with those marks three times already.

I had done nothing but scan her bread and count her pennies. So the next Tuesday, I made up my mind. While she was counting her coins, her head down, I reached over and tore a small corner off my register tape.