She does not use the wheelchair. It is folded against the wall near the ice-cream packer, the wheels and frame shining like nothing else in her store. The chair she sits in is of a dirty green, its tiny wheels invisible, its torn seat protected from her bulk by a thick pad of stained, corrugated foam rubber. By lifting her bandaged right leg off the floor and propelling her chair with her left foot, she can move about the store, and even to the bathroom in her adjoining house, but for most of the day she sits behind the cash register. There she has built her little fortification, and there she sits, a sentry without relief, for 15 hours a day.

Her nephew never tires, during his semiannual visits, of observing how the townspeople have learned to wait on themselves. A customer who wants a pack of cigarettes will enter briskly, step behind the long counters filled with what used to be called penny candy, remove a pack of cigarettes, cross the store to take a bottle of Pepsi Cola from the refrigerator, a loaf of bread from the freestanding bread counter, and a Police Gazette from the magazine shelf. (She does not sell Playboy or any of the newer slick magazines, but she has always had a good supply, at least since her mother's death, of True Confessions and the other old pulps.) Then he will come to the counter to pay up. "Well, Sarah," he will say—even the children call her Sarah, though she is over 80 now—"Looks as if State better hire a new football coach if they can't play no better"n that. Why they almost lost that game yesterday."