Gerta Jones is tired. Not just regular tired, but deep, bone exhausted, where she feels like she can barely walk another step, where she just wants to cry and collapse at the same time.

  Today, like every day, she has ventured out of The Shady Royale, her retirement complex, and walked down to the gas station on the corner to pick up a lottery ticket and her favorite chips, which are saturated with cheese and sour cream flavor. “Gross, mom,” her son, Harry, tells her every time he visits. “That stuff will clog your arteries.”

  Well, pooh on him. You don’t live to be sixty years old with clogged arteries and besides, she truly has nothing else to look forward to. Sad, she knows, but she’s honest. Honest to a fault, sometimes. When she gets to the gas station, which takes exactly six minutes on a good day and ten minutes on a bad one, she notices writing scrawled on one of the posts by pump number seven. She shuffles over and kneels down to read it. “I feel so alone,” someone has scrawled out in black marker. Underneath, someone else has written, “U are not alone.”

  Gerta’s mind whirls. This wasn’t here yesterday, so it must have happened last night between three o’clock in the afternoon and now. She studies it again. The handwriting seems to be male, but you can’t tell these days, honestly. She wonders if the same person wrote it, having a conversation with himself, but that seems doubtful. Still, they were written with the same color marker and the handwriting in both looks similar.

  She turns on her heel and heads over to the twenty-four hour mart. Steve, the owner, put up a new sign last week that reads, “Looking for something cool to quench your first? Check out our soda sale!” There is no soda sale. She told him yesterday that the sign was misleading and that he was lying to the public, but he just laughed and said, “Gerta, please don’t worry about it.”

  She walks in, the satisfying ding greeting her as she makes her way directly over to the counter. Steve is there as usual wearing his usual polo shirt – today it’s blue – and red vest. “Why, hello, Miss G,” he smiles. “The usual? Ticket and chips?”

  “I’m going to spice it up today,” she says, feeling adventurous. “I’m going to get coffee and a candy bar…a Snickers!”

  His left eyebrow raises. “Seriously? You go, girl!”

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  She beams. “Well, life is about adventure, right?”

  “Yes!” he exclaims. “You can’t have the same thing every day. Things would be boring and monotonous. You need a little chocolate to cancel out the sour cream chips, that’s for sure.”

  She laughs a little and gets a cup, pours in the coffee, then grabs a Snickers from the shelf. She tosses them on the counter and digs into her purse for her wallet, but as she’s doing so, she also grabs a handful of receipts, and paper flies everywhere like snow. “Argh,” she grimaces, bending down to grab them. Her knees hurt. Everything hurts all the damn time.

  “You okay?” Steve says, laughing.

  “Yes, I am totally and completely fine!” she says. “But you know who isn’t?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but your cameras probably do.”

  “What?” His eyebrows knit together, and his face turns concerned. “Did you see something?”

  “Someone wrote a message on one of the posts over by pump seven,” she says. Then she leans in. “I think you should call the police.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Someone was here last night who needs help,” she says. “They literally wrote that, something about being so alone and then someone wrote back and said they weren’t alone.”

  “Gerta,” he says slowly. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Go and see!”

  He rings her up and puts her things in a bag, then follows behind her to pump seven. A woman is standing against her car, her phone on speaker, the other person chattering loudly. “Like, as if,” the person says, “I would ever let him near my tits!”

  Steve rolls his eyes and Gerta leads him over to the post. He leans over and reads it carefully, staring at it for awhile, touching it, like the writing could jump from the post into his arms. “Huh,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He stands up quickly and begins walking back to the mart. “Paint over it,” he calls over his shoulder.

  “You can’t be serious!” she says back. “That poor person needs help, and now!”

  He turns around and walks back slowly over to her. He puts his hands on her shoulders. His hands feel rough and gigantic, like paws. “Look,” he says. “Listen to me carefully. I think you’re wonderful, I really do. But we have no clue who this person is. We have no idea why they wrote this, when they wrote this, what led up to why they wrote this, and so much more. I appreciate that you care so much, but there’s literally nothing we can do. Okay?”

  “Steve,” she says evenly. “There’s a lot we can do. Check your cameras. At least try. Maybe I can talk to him. We don’t need to involve the police or anything like that. Please?”

  “Do you realize that I would have to sit through hours of footage?”

  “Not hours. Just from three o’clock and until around now,” she pleads. “Come on. You always say how horrible the world is. Can’t we try to be…I don’t know…some kind of good?”