Exact Change

He never had change and she never had the right coins, and somehow this had become a small weekly negotiation neither of them wanted to win. "Next week," he would say, sliding the loaf across, and next week she would owe him forty pence and he would wave it off, and the debt would roll forward like a wheel that had decided where it was going. Mara had started keeping the forty pence in her coat pocket on purpose. She liked, she found, owing him something. It was a reason that lived outside of bread.