I have a deep abiding love for convenience stores. They are clean and succinct. They don’t require anything extra of me, neither bra nor brush, conversation or confrontation. They give me protein, caffeine, and those pillowy  “Bon Appetit” cream danishes that can set the worst of worlds to rights.

There are lots of convenience stores in this small college town, and each owned and operated by different immigrant families. There are many generations working different shifts in most of them. The wend and warp of accented English decreases with the youth of the employee; while the ease of the (“fake”, I heard a Ukrainian describe it) Polite American Smile increases.

My State is enforcing masks in all businesses, including, fantastically, ones that require use of the mouth. Except briefly in Lincoln County,a coastal town, which briefly decreed the law didn’t apply to People of Color. Which made everyone just lose their shit, as is to be expected, because we are all barely maintaining the integrity of our collective social sphincters as it is.

This is how masks work in my town.

I walk into any of the convenience stores and watch sweaty cashiers hurriedly put the straps of their black utilitarian masks back over their ears so quickly it must sting. They move with the kind of furtive misery that comes being caught in an immoral act their body desperately wants to continue. They are so tired. Tired from standing for eight hours or more, stocking shelves with bound mouths and wrenching an undesired elegance into their aching wrists to give change back without touching skin.

I say, “Dude, I’m only wearing this for you. I don’t…don’t really need ’em.”

I don’t?

The headlines still scream for a firm, fear-based click, but the charts they lead to aren’t scary to me anymore, now that months of increased data and knowledge have cropped the frightful height of their lines and winnowed the width of their thick bars. The cases rise, but that isn’t useful information, as I’ve nothing to compare it to. I believe cases rise because testing has risen.

Now that “underlying condition” follows the description of those who’ve died, making these pandemic deaths hard to distinguish in number and detail from that of a standard obit page.

Now that I’ve seen the disease pass through friends and family with the same tepid aggression and unfair selectivity of any bad flu.

I’m not particularly at risk, nor anyone I love. It affects my lens on all of this, naturally. If my father were still alive, suffering his last years with a blood clot burned on his brain, and lungs choked up with debris, I’d be afraid yet. I’d keep him separate and safe as possible. Because the masks wouldn’t.

But that isn’t how it goes in the convenience store in my town, in your town. The cashier first relaxes in the shoulders, then push their masks up their hot brown faces to cap mussed hair, and I slip mine down my chin to smile.

Then the door jangles again and we’re both caught criminals, hurriedly pulling the masks back. But the guy who walked in came with his t-shirt collar over his nose. He’s not really worried, then. He was just doing it for us, too.

And we all three reveal ourselves, like recognizing Masonic rings or distinct religious terminology. Guilty smiles, relief. We’re all “cool.” That is, corrupt, non-believers in the magic of the talisman, but still trying to respect our community by wearing it.