The grocer who remembers everything

He knows that I take coriander on Wednesdays and not on Fridays. He knows that my mother visits, mostly, in winter, and that she will want the harder of the two kinds of cucumber. He knows that, when I am sick, I am embarrassed about it, and he produces the ginger and the lemon without making me ask.

I do not know his name.

I have not asked for his name in, by my count, nine years.

The first six months, it was that I was new in the city and trying to be polite by not making a thing of it. The next two years, it was that I had let it go too long. The four years after that, it was that the not-asking had become, somehow, its own kind of thing between us — a quiet, mutual agreement to keep the relationship at the size we had agreed on, which was: the size of the small store, and the things in it.