George came in every Friday morning with the same request for a classic caramel Cow Tail, the old school candy with the vanilla cream in the center. Angela was generally quite good about stocking them. She didn’t necessarily care for George, but she found him enough of an irritant to ensure she didn’t have to argue with him about the matter. That was, until late that fateful Friday afternoon, when he came in with his feet planted to the grimy tile and a surly look plastered on his face.
“I don’t want those damn Werthers. I want what I always get.”
“We don’t have ‘em, George. Don’t know what else you want me to say.”
He opened his mouth in an attempt to retaliate, but she beat him to it. “Don’t be a child. I have enough children at home. I have enough children here.” She turned her attention to the teenage stocker down the chip aisle. Stocker was more of a symbolic title—Jordan spent more of his shift with his headphones on watching ESPN than he did getting anything on the shelves…no wonder there were no—
“Well maybe I’ll just never come back then. How about that? Lose a loyal customer?”
Angela kept her face artificially solemn.
“Well that would be a real shame, wouldn’t it?”
“You being sarcastic with me, Angela?”
“‘Course not, but it’s still Werthers or nothing.”
Their standoff would have continued the entire day. Angela could do it, too. She had several times before.
Before she could inform him of this, Jordan crept around the corner, phone blaring in his outstretched hand. He pushed the too-bright screen to her face.
“They say it’s gonna snow! Here!”
She didn’t even do the honor of providing the device a scrap of her attention.
“Put that away and do your job. You know the last time this part of Florida got snow, kid?” George let out a dejected humph that could have been taken as a sign of agreement if Angela thought about it hard enough.
“It’s cold enough though,” Jordan whined. “Just below freezing. The weather guy said—”
Angela rolled her eyes. “That anchor will say whatever it is that will keep you watching. Enough dramatics in that newsroom as it is.”
“Why are you guys always so down on everything all the time? How do you even know it won’t happen? Or you just say that, ‘cause it’s like automatic when you’re old?”
Angela shot him a glare at the mention of her age.
“Because the two of us have lived long enough to know that optimism is a scam,” George replied, probably more resentful about the Cow Tails he had been cheated out of than any over-sensationalized weather reporting.
Regardless, Jordan’s shoulders dropped, his eyes hid slightly behind his mop of brown hair. The disappointment that radiated from him cut her in a way that she hadn’t expected it would. Her voice softened slightly without her permission as she tried her hand at some sort of reconciliation.
“Have you ever seen real snow?”
“No. If I don’t see it now, it’s definitely not going to happen in ten years when the world’s actually on fire.”
He shook his head and stomped back down the aisle with the same fervor as Angela’s toddler might after being told no dessert before dinner.
She turned back to an uncharacteristically preoccupied George.
His eyes were glued to the empty parking lot and his shitty green sedan. Angie craned her neck to get a better look of her own and slowly started out the door at what she saw. They were small, but certainly present, dancing slightly as the wind disturbed their descent. Miniscule and impossibly fragile.
She could recognize the very moment the young man registered the small flakes falling outside the shop window. It was happiness she hadn’t seen from him in months. Jordan burst out the door as if he’d seen a miracle of nature. Angela didn’t try to stop him. She supposed to him, in a way, it was.
Even George surrendered his caramel debate and left a dollar on the counter before following Jordan outside. He and Angie sat there in silence as they watched the Quick Mart’s other employee try and catch snowflakes on his tongue. He jumped up and down. Spun on his tiptoes as if he could get closer to the source of his current excitement.
He pointed at the sky as if to say Told ‘ya.
She gave him a haphhazard shrug of defeat. He’d earned it.
“We got better snow than this in Albany,” Angie found herself admitting quietly to George. As if that was supposed to prove something. “My husband, when he was still around, couldn’t get enough of it. My kids too. I tolerated it because they did. He’d grown up in California, you see. This kind of thing was a rarity to someone used to infinite summers. He had no real idea how lucky he was for that.”
A beat of quiet. A distant laugh from Jordan as he ran back and forth in the grass adjacent to the gas pumps. Happiness without bounds.
“Well, I guess he wasn’t that lucky.”
George rubbed his hands together in a futile attempt to warm them. He didn’t give her that token look of pity that many others did, and yet she could smell it on him like overused cologne. From him, though, it felt different. An unfortunate type of solidarity instead of clean cut sympathy.
“Sam was the same. Before we settled down, we stayed at his parents’ old cabin in Michigan. He’d always been around that kind of cold. I had, too. He would try and get me to skate on the lake outside our house every time it froze over. Fell on my ass more often than I managed to stay upright.”
George pressed his lips into a thin line. “I wish I had tried a little harder to learn.”
The snow started to come down heavier then. Dusting the grass and pavement, consuming the color winter hadn’t yet drained from the earth. It was bitter outside, enough for it to stick, but there was a warmth of newfound understanding and novelty in the air that made the outside world feel more temperate than it ought to.
“I miss getting excited about that sort of stuff,” Angie said, softly, bracing herself as Jordan attempted to shape what had collected on the sidewalk into a ball. It wasn’t working–snow was too dry—but he didn’t seem to mind. If he somehow managed to persevere and lob one at her anyway, she didn’t think she would mind it either.
Georgia Hope writes queer fantasy with a southern gothic twist and essays that break down the turbulent relationship between adolescence and academia. Currently a high school senior in the state of Texas, her idea of a good time is exploring haunted small towns with a notebook, camera, and a large cup of iced coffee. When she’s not making her readers cry you can find her gathering more bizarre lore for her next story or having an existential crisis on her Instagram page @georgiainabook.
Featured image by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash.
