"Just so you know,” Joe said, handing her a starched black apron on her first morning at the butcher shop, “the women will hate you.”
It was December, and the snow had just begun to press its soft weight on the rooftops of the small Michigan town where she’d landed, suddenly and with little plan, like a letter delivered to the wrong address. She had stepped off the bus with a canvas bag and a name no one here knew, and walked the main street with that quiet, resolute look of someone who had left something unfinished behind.
The butcher shop had appeared like a lighthouse in a cold mist—its windows warm-lit and slightly fogged, the air inside perfumed with spice and marrow. She had wandered in, not quite looking for work but knowing, instinctively, that work might be the surest way to anchor herself to this new geography. Joe had hired her without asking many questions.
"Eiighteen an hour,” he’d said, as though it was neither a gift nor a risk, just the natural order of things. “Come in Saturday. Early.”
Now, standing in the raw, meaty hum of the shop, she looked up at him, confused and half-smiling, as if searching for the punchline. Joe stared back at her through the thick lenses of his black plastic frames, his expression unmoved.
“They’ll hate you because you’re beautiful,” he said, as simply as one might mention the fat content of pork belly. “Because you’re bright.”
He didn’t mean it cruelly. There was no edge in his voice, no caution. Just a plainspoken kind of knowing, the way you might tell someone that porcelain tiles hold the morning’s chill long after the sun has risen, or that the best walnuts are kept near the baking supplies in aisle nine.
She nodded slowly, the smile fading. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear with a hand that had not yet learned the rhythm of knives and cleavers, that still smelled faintly of lavender soap and ink.
Behind the counter, Megan—the old manager with a soft-spoken mouth and a hard-earned calm—watched the exchange. She gave her a wink, a glance like a hand extended underwater. Joe was right.
Megan, impervious to the hierarchy of gazes and the economies of desirability, had no use for the kind of rivalry that flickered in other women’s eyes like a match half-lit. She didn’t care if men looked or didn’t. She didn’t measure herself in comparisons. That made her rare. That made her kind.
And so, she began—learning the cool heft of bone beneath blade, the language of fat marbling through muscle, the choreography of wrapping, weighing, exchanging. She would come to understand the temperature of silence in the back room, the scent of iron that clung to her hands even after hot water and lemon. But most of all, she would learn to read the eyes of the women on the other side of the counter—not with judgment, but with a tender kind of comprehension.
She would not hate them in return. That, too, would set her apart.
