Gerry didn’t need caffeine to face the day. Regardless, he liked to brew a pot of French Roast while he ate his breakfast. The myriad noises of the coffeemaker were comforting in their familiarity, like awakening to the routine of an early-rising lover getting ready for work. The hiss of steam like labored breathing. The climactic burble— delivered with the vigor of someone expectorating in the bathroom sink—that announced the conclusion of brewing. Let other men hang on the clicking of heels receding down a long hallway, the turning of keys in locks; Gerry found contentment in the tiny pings of hot glass expanding.

The young man knew he could’ve saved money by just running plain water through the Mr. Coffee, but he found the smell reassuring, too. Besides, with his employee discount, it didn’t cost that much to keep up this daily ritual. He never drank any of it.

He poured a bowl of bite-sized shredded wheat, his favorite. Presweetened cereals had been contraband in Gerry’s youth; his father was a dentist and a health-food pioneer. After 10 years of Dad mirthlessly dispensing sugarless gum and raisins at Halloween, few trick-or-treaters had bothered to ring their door any more. Years later, following the divorce, embittered older kids still threw eggs at their house and scrawled obscenities on the windows with bar soap.

Kids at school had steered clear of Gerry in the cafeteria once they’d become familiar with the queer contents of his sack lunches. From time to time, a new arrival unwittingly plopped down at his vacant table, and upon seeing the dense brown bread and alfalfa sprouts on the boy’s sandwiches, marveled with all the wide-eyed awe of British missionaries making first contact with naked, sun-baked savages. The fare in Gerry’s brown bags was useless currency with the lunchbox set. Nobody swapped potato chips or Oreos for carrot sticks or a bruised pear.

After Dad left, Mom had loosened up on the dietary restrictions, trying to cement the family back together with melted cheese and butter cream frosting. But it was too late. For Gerry’s 10th birthday, she sweetened his cake with refined sugar instead of fruit juice concentrate. The stomach cramps that followed kept him out of school the next day.

Grinding the crunchy little biscuits beneath his perfect molars, Gerry scanned the nutritional information on the side of the cereal box and quickly tallied calories. One recommended portion had approximately 200; 240 with skim milk. But the carton also claimed it held 10 full servings, while Gerry felt lucky if he could make one stretch to five or six, considering his generous pour. Plus he preferred one-percent milk to flavorless skim. Those factors undoubtedly brought the grand total much closer to the 500-plus mark.

“Five hundred calories.” When he said the number out loud, it sounded like an obscene amount of food. Gerry knew from restocking the racks in the checkout aisles that plenty of women’s magazines promised you could lose weight fast on crash diets of little more than 500 calories a day—”and still keep up your energy!” What would that do to an unborn fetus, he wondered as he rinsed out his cereal bowl. If a mother-to-be unwittingly denied herself too many essential nutrients before discovering her pregnancy, would the baby be born anemic and glassy-eyed, or as skinny yet vigorous as Cosmopolitan cover girls?

Today, as every day, Gerry greeted each Shop-N-Save customer with a seasoned “Hello” as he began ringing up their items. After that, he lapsed into a scripted set of questions (“Paper or plastic?” “Do you want that in a freezer bag?”) from which he deviated only when he needed to see an ID before selling beer or wine. He assumed longtime patrons noticed his unvarying routine and considered him unfriendly. His only consolation was knowing they wouldn’t have thought him insincere if only they’d realized how deeply he did care about every grocery they purchased.

It saddened him when he worked afternoons and saw frazzled bachelors stockpiling frozen entr饳. Did they know how much sodium was in that brick of Birds Eye frozen lasagna? He wanted to put his hands on their sagging shoulders and ask when they’d last had their blood pressure checked. “At the rate you’re going,” he imagined saying, “when you finally do meet the girl of your dreams, you’ll already be halfway to your first triple-bypass.”

Walking home, the cashier munched on a banana. “High in potassium, the body’s natural upper,” he repeated to himself. He’d make brown rice and stir-fried vegetables for dinner tonight; he wanted to use up the rest of the broccoli. “It’s the colon’s broom,” he thought with a grin. Not that Gerry had ever experienced problems with regularity. But sometimes, inexplicably, his system felt a little backed up.