The napkin was thin enough to see my fingers through. It came from the chrome dispenser on the counter, the kind that gives you two when you want one, and I kept the one with the printing on it. The logo was a pine tree inside an oval, green ink gone pale, the store’s name curved under it and a phone number with the old three-letter exchange still standing in front of the digits.
It was the last store of its kind on that road. Forty miles of highway and one pump island, one cooler of bait, one rack of chips, and a coffee machine that had been there since before the coffee got expensive. The man behind the counter rang me up on a register with real buttons. He folded the napkin around a muffin without being asked.
I ate the muffin in the car. I kept the napkin because I already knew. You can tell when a place is running on the last of something. The gas prices were handwritten. The bait cooler hummed too hard. Next year there would be a chain, or nothing, and either way the pine tree in the oval would be gone.
Paper does not keep well. This one has yellowed along one fold and gone soft as cloth where my thumb has been. The green ink is fading toward gray. The phone number would not reach anyone now. I folded it once more, along a fresh line, and slid it into the drawer.
The tree still shows. The name under it is going.