An old woman came into Tomas’s shop at opening time, paid in worn notes and coins counted twice, and left carrying sixty kilos of beef packed into bags she could barely keep from dragging across the wet pavement.
It was never the good cuts.
She never asked for those.
She wanted the cheap muscle—the pieces other customers wrinkled their noses at, the meat that would have been ground into mince or sent to the soup kitchen, if the soup kitchen still accepted deliveries. She clutched the bags against her coat as though someone might snatch them during the twelve minutes it took her to reach the old service road.
Her eyes moved constantly: shop window, alley mouth, bus stop, the man unloading crates across the street.
The way a person looks when they are carrying something they cannot afford to drop and cannot afford to explain.
Tomas had stood behind that counter for twenty-six years. He knew the difference between a customer who was poor and a customer who was frightened.
Lidia Varga was both.
