By the register, under a plastic dome gone milky with scratches, sat a pie. One pie. Whole, uncut, the crust factory-crimped in a pattern too even for a hand, a few beads of dark filling welled up through the vents and hardened there like sap.
I lifted the dome to look. It came up with a soft suck of stale air, and under it the smell was sugar and cardboard and the faint plastic of the tin. The crust had the pale sheen of something baked far away and shipped in, more shellac than pastry, the kind that holds its shape through a truck and a warm shelf and does not weep. A card taped to the dome said HOMESTYLE. Nothing about it had been near a home.
Everything else on the counter answered a problem. The pie answered nothing. Nobody drives forty minutes of gravel because they have run out of pie. But people driving through want a stop to feel like a stop, want to buy a thing that is not gas and not a headache remedy, and a pie by the register is the store betting on that want, the one purchase in the place that admitted a person might just want to sit in the truck and eat something sweet with a plastic fork.
The dome had a chip out of the rim where it had been set down hard, too many times, and through the chip a little of the outside air had been getting in for a while. The filling nearest that gap had gone from shine to matte, a dull spot the size of a thumbnail, drying from the edge in, while the rest of the pie still gleamed under its clouded dome.