Mr Nowicki

Mr Nowicki comes in every morning at eight-fifteen. He has been coming since before I started working there, which is six years now. He always buys the same thing: a box of vitamin C tablets, the generic kind, and sometimes a packet of throat lozenges if there's been a change in the weather.

He is eighty-one years old and in excellent health. This is not a coincidence, or not entirely. He told me once that he comes because his wife used to come with him, and after she died he kept coming, and at some point it became a reason to get dressed in the morning. He said this without any particular weight — as a fact, not as something requiring a response.

I make sure to be behind the counter at eight-fifteen. It costs me nothing and he doesn't know I do it.

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