The cooler by the door held milk on the top two shelves and, below the milk, the bait. Styrofoam tubs, the kind that squeak when you turn them, stacked four high with the lids friction-fit and a smear of dirt at every seam. Someone had written DEW WORMS on a shelf strip in grease pencil, then WORMS, smaller, where the strip ran out.
I picked one up. Cold, lighter than it looked, the peat inside shifting when I tipped it. Through the fog on the plastic dome of the next tub over I could see the minnows, or where the minnows were, a darker suggestion sliding when the compressor kicked and shook the shelf. They kept them cold on purpose. Cold slows a minnow down to where it keeps a day or two. Warm, and by afternoon you have a tub of the drowned.
The tub had a price stuck on the lid, four-fifty, higher than the tackle shop in town would charge if the town were not forty minutes off with the lake right there. That is the whole arithmetic. The lake is close. Somebody always leaves the bait on the counter at home, or runs out by ten, or decides at the boat launch that the biting is worth another tub. The store bets on that. The store bets every morning that the fish are on and the fishermen are careless.
I set the worms back in their slot. Cold had beaded the dome of the minnow tub, and one drop had run down and frozen where the cooler’s air hit it, a small clear bead holding to the styrofoam, not falling, waiting for the door to open and the warm to reach it.