Aling Bebang's sari-sari store had a window the size of a shoebox, and behind it, most afternoons, was Marisol counting change with a pencil behind her ear. I bought things I did not need. One clove of garlic. A single stick of Marlboro I never smoked. A sachet of shampoo when my hair was still wet from home.
You're going to run out of excuses, she said one Tuesday, not looking up.
Then I'll invent new ones, I said, and her pencil stopped moving, and something in the shoebox window went soft.
We talked through iron grills, her inside her mother's small kingdom of Skyflakes and vinegar and hanging strips of candy, me outside on the cracked pavement where the tricycles waited. Merienda was our whole romance: two pesos of Yakult, split, because she liked the first sip and I liked watching her like it. Fiesta season she strung the store with capiz lights, and her face under them was the reason I understood why moths do what they do.
Her mother saw. Mothers always see. Anak, Aling Bebang told her, loud enough for the street, that one has empty pockets and full eyes. Marry the pockets.
Marisol laughed then, but on my birthday she slid a Yakult through the grill and would not take my coin. Libre, she said. Free. The most expensive word she owned.
They closed the store the summer her father got sick, packed the kingdom into boxes, sold the grill for scrap. I went the day the shoebox window was just a hole in a wall. On the ledge she had left one Yakult, warm from the sun, and beside it, in pencil, on the back of a Marlboro pack: For the first sip. It was always yours.
I drank it slow. Two pesos of sweetness and a whole childhood of almost. I still keep the pencil. It's the only thing I never made an excuse to buy.