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as if she is having difficulty bringing him into
     focus. “What are you scoring?”
    Lemuel has the eerie feeling he has looked into these eyes before. … Nonplussed, he thrusts out his empty hands, palms up.
     “I am not scoring nothing. I am not even playing.”
    The girl flashes a deliberate smile, half defiant, half defensive; freckles dance on her face. “Hey, don’t be a doorknob.
     Score something. Everyone knows supermarkets pad their prices to make up for shoplifting. Which means someone’s got to shoplift
     to keep the supermarkets honest, right? To make sure they don’t profit by people
not
shoplifting.”
    “I can say you I have never looked at it that way.”
    The girl hikes a shoulder. “Hey, now you know it like a poet.” Smiling dreamily, she wanders off down the aisle, inspecting
     labels, casually stealing the cans that appeal to her.
    Lemuel meanders on to the beer area, where he is overwhelmed by the choice. Confronted by cans and bottles and six-packs and
     twelve-packs and cases of every imaginable size and shape and color, he rolls his head in bewilderment. A young man with a
     three-day blond beard, long hair tied back with a colorful ribbon, granny glasses, and a small silver ring dangling from one
     earlobe, struggles past pulling a dolly loaded with cases of alcohol-free beer. A tag pinned to his flannel shirt identifies
     him as “The Manager” and “Dwayne.”
    “If you don’t see what you’re looking for,” Dwayne says, “ask.”
    Lemuel works up his courage. “Do you by any chance sell kvass?”
    The manager scratches at his beard. “Is that a brand name or a generic?” When Lemuel looks back blankly, he asks, “What exactly
     is kvass?”
    “It is a kind of beer brewed from bread.”
    “If someone out there’s smart enough to make beer out of bread,” Dwayne declares with an engaging laugh, “we sure as heck
     want to market it. In case the word hasn’t reached you, at the E-Z Mart the customer is king.” He produces a pad and a stub
     of a pencil. “How are you spelling kvass?” he wants to know, licking the point of the pencil, staring at Lemuel expectantly.
    “I am spelling kvass K, V, A, double S.”
    Dwayne looks up from his pad and peers at Lemuel through his granny glasses. “You speak with some kind of an accent.”
    “You think so?”
    “Yeah, babe, I think so. An accent’s nothing to be embarrassed about. America is a melting pot of accents. Where is it you’re
     from?”
    “St. Petersburg, Russia.”
    Dwayne brightens. “That’s cool. When I was working toward a master’s in business administration at Harvard, I did my thesis
     on the disadvantages of central planning on a non-market-oriented economy. It had a catchy title—Trickle-Down Incompetence.’
     “
    “With a master’s in business administration from Harvard, what are you doing running a supermarket in Backwater?”
    Dwayne pulls a pack of Life Savers from the pocket of his shirt, offers one to Lemuel, takes one himself when he shakes his
     head. “I did the Wall Street bit for a while,” Dwayne says, “analyzing the infrastructure of companies for a
Fortune
500 brokerage house, making big bucks, washing my hands in corporate bathrooms where they got real towels, living in a condo
     on Third Avenue, the whole Manhattan scene. Then Shirley, she’s the cashier with the naturally wavy hair, Shirley and me,
     we decided we’d rather be ordinary fishes in a small unpolluted pond than minnows in a sewer. So here we are”—Dwayne makes
     swimming motions with his arms—”swimming away.” He stuffs the pad back in his jeans, sticks out a paw. “I’m Dwayne to my friends.”
    Lemuel shakes his hand. “I am Falk, Lemuel, to everyone.”
    “So it’s been nice talking to you, Lem, babe. See you around the pond, huh?”
    Back in the street, Lemuel experiences something akin to rapture of the deep—he feels like a skin diver who has surfaced from
     giddy depths. A melody he does