I came around the corner into the dairy aisle carrying a basket with coffee, hamburger buns, and the vague intention of buying something healthy enough to make me feel like my life was under control. The Piggly Wiggly was nearly empty. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead with that lonely grocery-store sound that always makes a man feel as though he is living inside the middle of his own life. Somewhere near the registers an old country song was playing too softly to make out the words. Outside, Montana was settling into evening. The sky beyond the front windows was deep blue. The pickups in the parking lot were already beginning to gather dew.

Then I saw her. She was standing halfway down the aisle with her back to me, looking into the cooler as though she had all the time in the world. Tight Wrangler jeans, dark blue and worn just enough to fit her perfectly. A thin white t-shirt tucked into them. Long black hair falling down the center of her back almost to her waist. She was Choctaw. I knew it before she ever turned around. There was something in the way she stood, something self-possessed, something old and quiet and dangerous. She did not belong beneath fluorescent lights and price tags and cartons of milk. She looked like she ought to be standing beside a river somewhere at dusk with cicadas singing in the trees. She looked like she ought to be leaning against an old truck beneath the stars while somebody played a slow song on a porch radio fifty yards away. She looked like the sort of woman a man sees once when he is twenty and spends the next twenty years accidentally looking for in every town, every crowd, every dream, every pair of headlights passing him on a dark road.

I slowed down. Not because I decided to, but because some older part of me had already stopped. She reached up toward the top shelf. The white fabric pulled tight across her chest. And suddenly the entire aisle became radioactive. Not loud. Not vulgar. Worse. The kind of beauty that moves through a man like voltage. For one impossible second everything else disappeared: the lights, the milk, the work week, the years, the loneliness, all of it. There was only her. The line of her body. The curve of her waist. The thin white shirt stretched just enough to leave nothing to the imagination and somehow make imagination stronger anyway.

I felt it all at once, ridiculous and immediate and completely beyond my control. A hard-on between the yogurt and the eggs. I stood there holding a carton of creamer like an idiot. French vanilla. Hazelnut. I read the label three times without absorbing a single word. Because beneath the bright fluorescent lights of a grocery store in a small Montana town, this woman had somehow become the center of gravity.

Then she turned. Dark eyes. High cheekbones. Soft mouth. The kind of face that does not merely make a man want her. The kind that makes him suddenly remember every lonely thing he has ever wanted. For half a second she looked directly at me. Not embarrassed. Not surprised. Almost amused. As if she already knew exactly what she had done to me. Then she smiled. Just a little. A secret smile. Not flirtation. Not kindness. Recognition. The sort of smile a woman gives when she knows she could ruin your life and is kind enough not to. The sort of smile that follows a man home and stays with him for years.

Then she turned and disappeared down the next aisle. I remained where I was beside the milk and the eggs, holding the creamer in both hands like a man who has just seen something impossible step briefly into the world and then vanish again. The old country song was still playing. The fluorescent lights were still humming. Somewhere near the front of the store a cashier laughed. Everything was exactly the same. Except it wasn’t. Because for one second in a Piggly Wiggly in a small Montana town, I saw the face of every impossible thing I had ever wanted walking toward the next aisle. And all I could think was: My God. Look at her.