“Can I help you?” Claire asked, and the woman’s head jerked up.
“I can pick out my own paper, thank you,” she snapped, and tucking the paper under her arm, she reached for a pint of milk.
Dan must have polished the bottles, for there were no traces of smeared ink to be seen on the glass. Claire stood there uncertainly while the woman took her purchases to the counter.
“That will be two pounds twenty,” Dan said. He wasn’t friendly to anyone, it seemed, except maybe the milkman.
The woman retrieved a little coin purse of faded, embroidered silk. “I knew your mother,” she said as she counted out several twenty-pence coins. “We were both in the embroidery club.”
It wasn’t until the woman had pushed the coins across to Dan that Claire realized she’d been speaking to her.
“Oh, did you? I didn’t know Mum embroidered.”
“Every Tuesday for ten years,” the woman said as she collected her paper and milk. “Until she moved down to London.” She glanced at Claire, her eyes small and shrewd in her wrinkled face. “You can tell her Eleanor Carwell says hello.”
“Yes, of course I will, Mrs. Carwell,” Claire answered.
“It’s ‘Miss,’” she said, and left the shop.
Claire sagged a little. She’d been at this job for less than two hours and already she wanted to go home. She didn’t think she could stand Dan Trenton’s unfriendliness along with a potential parade of villagers who knew her or her family, not to mention the fact that she’d done a rubbish job at the most basic thing Dan had asked of her.
Resolutely she turned to him. She wasn’t going to give up now. “Thank you for wiping off the milk bottles. I would have done it,though.” Dan grunted in reply. “What should I do now?” Claire asked.
For a second she thought she saw something flicker on his face, some semi-positive emotion, but it was gone so quickly she couldn’t be sure. “You can check the expiration dates on all the tins,” Dan said, and pointed to a shelf of baked beans, tomato soup, and other basic items. “Throw out anything that’s expired.” He reached under the counter and produced a cardboard box. “Think you can manage that?”
“Yes,” Claire answered a bit sharply. She could only take so much sarcasm. “I know I am new to this, but I’m not an idiot.” Dan didn’t reply.
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” she remarked as she started searching for the expiration dates stamped on a variety of unappealing-looking tins.
“Why would you?”
“I don’t know. He never comes into the shop?”
“She, and no. That wouldn’t be hygienic.”
Claire pictured the dog cringing under the table. “But she must get lonely.”
“I take care of her fine. I walk her at lunchtime and at the end of the day.”
“I . . . I didn’t mean . . .” Claire began, and Dan sighed.
“I know you didn’t,” he said, and turned away.
A few hours into her first day and Claire ached with exhaustion, not just from bending and straightening from hours of stacking or checking and then chucking tins, but from sharing the same small space with a man who radiated tension. Dan Trenton seemed like the most unlikely person to run a cozy little shop. He should be smiling and chatty and leaning over the counter as he talked to people. Instead he simmered with latent anger, seeming almost to resent anyone who dared comethrough the doors. She wondered what had possessed him to take this job, but she didn’t have the courage to ask.
She’d certainly seen enough tinned goods to last a lifetime. “Tinned golden syrup pudding?” she asked as she chucked a tin into the nearly full box at her feet. “It expired three months ago. Does anyone buy this stuff?”
“I stock a full range of tinned items,” Dan answered. He was feeding scratch cards into the Lottery ticket dispenser.
“I know, but if no one buys it, surely you shouldn’t stock it?” Claire returned. “Tinned deviled eggs... How do they even do that? And does anyone eat Spam anymore?”
“I do,” Dan said, and she didn’t think he was joking.
“What about getting in some different things?” she suggested. “Something people actually want to eat?”
“Like caviar or black truffles?” Dan filled in. “You might be used to such luxury items, but most people in Hartley-by-the-Sea are a little more plebeian.”
She turned around, pressing her hands to the pulsing ache in the small of her back. “You think I eat truffles and caviar?”
