I am holding six people in a row, each one leaning slightly toward the little screen, and I am holding the screen too, and the scanner, and the coins that keep threatening to slip from the tray back down into my care. I hold the cans of soup. I hold the loose apple the machine cannot find a name for.
I hold the woman's whole weight through the balls of her feet as she shifts, one hip to the other, waiting.
The machine keeps saying there is an unexpected item in the bagging area. I have checked. Every item I can feel is exactly where the woman set it. Nothing has appeared that I did not already bring down and settle. I do not know what the machine means. I only know that the bag on the metal shelf presses down at four hundred grams, and I am accounting for all four hundred, and none of them are unexpected to me.
Now she is muttering that this is the last thing she needed today. I measured. The thing she is buying weighs less than the phone in her pocket. Yet she stands heavier than she did an hour ago, her shoulders lowered toward me by something I cannot find on any scale I have.
I have held people through worse and never located it. I have decided it is real anyway, because I can feel her leaning into me for it, the way the tired always do.
The light blinks. She waits. Somewhere beyond the wall I hold the moon at its distance, and the coins in the tray, and her.
Whatever the machine claims is missing, I have her.
I always did.