There Ain't That Much Beef in the Butcher Shop

Michael Edwards

The sink is full of tongues. Beef tongues, each as big equally a man'due south shoe, frozen into i icy clump the size of a propane canister, defrosting for an afternoon pickup. At that place's a lot of mouth, too, I guess, or palate -- I'thou non certain, considering the tiptop natural language is unfrozen enough that I can run into a os that looks similar a little saddle. Just right at present the guys in back are breaking cows -- sawing the hindquarters downward with a handsaw, cutting the hip on the band saw, then the shank, thumbing out the ribs for curt loin. Short loin is their money cutting. No ane is particularly worried about the tongues. You don't have to rush the tongues, they tell me.

"Who ordered tongues?" I ask. Sometimes it's loud in a butcher shop. The grinding saws or the clattering, the cuber, the vacuum sealer, the hasp and slam of the walk-in-refrigerator door, the radio. Not a cruel, industrial noise -- no one wears earplugs. This is the loudness of commerce, the fail-rubber cadence of phone call-in orders, the rattling meter of the morning butcher-shop routine.

So far today I've hung iii bone-in rib roasts for crumbling, trimmed and trayed out lxxx boneless-skinless chicken breasts, retrayed the rib eyes and the pork chops -- rotate the meat, supervene upon the light-green paper between the layers, restack the cuts on narrow, slide-in aluminum trays, which are notched, edge to border, into the store-length drinking glass counter -- and collected a shop'due south worth of trim for cut-down and grinding. I've wiped the blocks with bleach h2o twice. And I'1000 doing the least of information technology.

"Who ordered the tongues?" I say again.

"A medico," Dennis calls out. He's head-down, working his six-inch blade into a tenderloin, shaving the blade along the broadside, steadily pulling the tissue. Trimming with the grain, they call it. "Some surgeon."

"Why so many?" I can only think: tongue sandwiches. A whole lot of them.

Dennis shrugs. He'southward got a picayune kid'southward haircut, the demeanor of a philosophy professor, and easily glossy with the tiny scars that come up with fifteen years of cutting meat. Butcher. "Uses them to demonstrate some new musical instrument," he says. "I approximate they're about the size of a uterus." I can't tell if he's serious. But no ane laughs, which, with these guys, may well be another way to break my balls.

And then they point me to the counter, where a woman has edged up to the deli, in forepart of the ham loaves. The day's first customer. I rinse and towel off my easily, and then turn to her.

Butchering is propelled by time. The entire morn is ane terrific act of preparation. There are only so many hours to sell, and so many hours to prepare for the selling. The meat never waits. But customers never come into a butcher shop to browse. They are there to buy. In that location's e'er something they demand, something they must have, or something they don't know about withal. So yous requite them a little fourth dimension -- you rinse your hands, you brand heart contact, you touch your hat, yous show a little focus even as you're moving through the ritual.

It's simple enough: They want answers, and they want meat. A butcher has to take a lot of each. So that'due south when I lean in, confronting the solidity of the counter, into the skin of the frock. I've been in that location long plenty to exist a guy with some answers, a guy with trusted skills. Butcher.

I ask her, "How tin I aid you?"

Several Christmases ago, I decided to cook a standing rib roast. I had some dim thought I wanted to make Yorkshire pudding with it. My local supermarket had recently moved its butchers out of the stores to a central processing plant. In order to make my request, the kid behind the meat counter handed me the phone so I could speak directly with the regional managing director. I read aloud what I had written at the top of a shopping listing, weight and cutting. A suggestion, frankly, from Julia Child. I had no idea where it came from in the moo-cow, even how big it would be.

"I can take it out to you in three days," the regional manager said.

"Is there any special way to melt it?" I asked.

There was a long interruption, and then I could flick what I was up against, speaking into a gap similar that. The guy had what I wanted, he just didn't know what I needed. Perchance he was looking something upwardly for me on the Internet, a recipe or a tip. More likely he was looking out his window at a dumpster in the parking lot. The pause made me quit it. I needed someone with a footling knowledge.

I live in a small boondocks where the butchers have generally folded up their tents. So that day, I collection into the city, to an old-timey shop a friend had told me almost chosen Kincaid's. It was, he said, the all-time butcher shop in America. Or the terminal. Worth the bulldoze, he said. Nested in a residential neighborhood soggy with former trees on the north side of Indianapolis, it looked the role -- little storefront, wooden butcher blocks, rolls of white freezer paper hovering in their brackets, handmade signs in the window advertisement various pork chops. And large, chockablock guys in aprons, Sharpies tucked in shirt pockets, wrists similar baseball bats.

Fifty-fifty a week earlier Christmas, requesting a rib roast in a joint like Kincaid'southward didn't make anyone blink. And when I asked for help on how to cook it, the possessor stepped frontwards. He was a purse of cement with a bad haircut named Dave, who regarded me with nighttime eyes, as if uncertain I was paying attention. Butcher. The guy was the concrete representation of his chore -- muscular, stern, sore, maybe only a piffling too aware that the world was changing. I deserved his uncertainty, if that's what this was. I was nigh to purchase a $120 cut of meat, and I had no clue what I was doing.

"Offset of all, dainty, nice, nice, nice, overnice meat," he said. Five prissys. I remember information technology like it was a twenty-four hour period ago. "Here's the matter. Put your oven on high. Superhigh. All the way. Get information technology as hot as you lot can. Then put this in at that place for x minutes. That'll seal it right up. Brownish the whole outside. That's the merely trick. Then become ahead and follow old Julia Child." I asked him almost Yorkshire pudding and he reached nether the counter, pulled out a handwritten recipe from a pile of Xeroxes. "I like a little more than salt than this recipe calls for," he says. "But I'm not a skinny man and I do have some habits." The store bustled, but I'll be damned if he was thinking most annihilation merely my roast, my skills, my meal. He raised his eyebrows, nodded, and told me it would be corking.

At a bakery, the staff of life is finished when they paw it to you lot. At a grocery store, you assume all the take chances once the boxed-up food is in your auto. A butcher shop is unlike any other retail venue, because the parties on both sides of the counter are at work on the same process. The butcher is a kind of partner. Somehow the prime number rib yous serve belongs in equal measure to him equally it does to y'all.

You can ask butchers anything and they will deconstruct your demand. Ask for a porterhouse and trust that they will pick through the T-bones to become you a good one. Or ask what a porterhouse is and they volition accept out a T-bone to explain that if the short-loin portion is a good scrap thicker than an inch, it's a porterhouse. Or ask if a porterhouse is what you want in the start place. They'll inquire how you're cooking it, what you're serving with it, how much room yous accept on your cooking surface. They'll discover the answer. And whether it's the apron or the smudges of blood or the enormous weight of the counter or the sheer mass of the product, you lot believe a butcher. He knows.

A man should have a butcher.

I became a Kincaid'south loyalist. Yr later yr, I watched them piece of work the room -- thorough, efficient, a little fussy. They took all orders -- a single burger or a dozen chops -- seriously. They called the women beloved and dear just never pissed them off. They called the men sir but still managed to pal around. They looked you in the eye and remembered your last club. Generous in their curiosity and professional person in their detachment, they took all comers -- the exacting and the simply curious -- with equal zeal. They knew things, but you had to enquire. They were butchers, the final monks of the town foursquare. They had answers.

I want to be a guy with answers. And so it was that one day earlier this yr, I asked them if I could give information technology a try.

I showed up wearing a hat, a threadbare T-shirt, some old pants, and a decent pair of sneakers. When I stood at the ii footling saloon doors that hung between the work area and the back of the shop, Dave looked at me from head to toe.

"Okay," he said. "Yous expect like a butcher. Arrive here."

The director, Shawn, pole-armed and heavy-bellied, with a sheen of sweat on his brow, huffed. Immediately he regarded me with sidelong disdain, leaning against the metal tabular array, his weight on brisket he'd only cut and towel-dried. "I got orders coming in," he said. "I don't have anything for this guy."

Information technology's cool, I wanted to say. I can only watch. But watching a butcher was not the point. Dave understood as much. He pointed to the front of the store, up the narrow passage between the counter and the walk-in, enough room there for i human to stand and some other to pass, wrenched sideways. "Only put him on chickens today," Dave said. "Go him used to the knives. Lori can fix him up."

And so I settled in with Lori, the but female butcher in the store, a skinny trivial hardass who knew every price in the store without looking. Butcher. She slid a knife across the block to me. "Always exit your knife closed -- facing the wall -- when you're washed," she said. She lay a craven leg on the cake, tugged a handful of skin, so cut it. "Y'all gotta employ your judgment about how much to accept off, but nosotros own't here to sell people chicken skin."

I was a cook once, and a dishwasher before that. I've hung Sheetrock and laid roofing. There is a coziness to manual work that I understand. Repetitive tasks -- pulling the gummy viscera from the breast of a craven, trimming out the little ridge of fatty, cut off ragged edges -- that stuff was some comfort to me that first morning. The knife they gave me was then abrupt that information technology required virtually no downward force per unit area at all. "Y'all just move the knife forwards," Lori said. "I move simply. And if you drop it, don't try to trap it or break the fall. Merely bound dorsum with your hands up. That matter will stick in your foot but as skilful equally it volition a boneless-skinless."

During a lull, with Lori in the walk-in dealing with a plastic saucepan total of leg quarters, a adult female approached the counter. The others were in the dorsum inspecting an order. And I figured: No time like the present. The meat was right there in front of me. How difficult could it be?

She was threescore years old, with a Fendi purse on her shoulder and a little piece of paper pinched between her fingers similar a babe mouse. I stepped forrad.

"I need just a quarter pound of lean ground beefiness," she said. And before I could tell her, "You got it!" or "Good enough!" -- the phrases I had picked on the drive in equally my own personal signature to every transaction -- she kept on. "Lean," she said. "How lean? What'southward the percentage? Only a quarter pound. I brand only i hamburger. Nothing left over. And I need two flank steaks. Non the marinated ones." I glanced left and downward. "What sort of marinade do you use, anyway?" she went on. "I can marinate it myself, tin't I? Can you sell me the marinade separately?"

"Okay," I said, looking for a place to start with the work of it, with the litany of questions. She was asking for a quarter pound of basis beef, simply I didn't know which side of the hamburger case to reach for. The signs faced the customer. "Okay," I said again.

My get-go transaction, stymied past a question near hamburger. What did lean mean, anyhow? When I couldn't reply, she narrowed her optics and bore in. "And I desire four centre-cutting, bone-in pork chops. And actually, they have to be the aforementioned thickness," she said. I nodded and said okay again. "And be sure yous chine the bone."

You lot tin't be a butcher unless you know what you're selling, and I'll be damned if I knew what chining the bone meant. There was a piece of newspaper in my pocket on which I'd inscribed the various cuts, their names in rows as they were in the case. Along the top, it read, Chuck-Rib-Curt loin-Sirloin. Below: Round. Shank and brisket, plate and flank. What good was that doing me now? Chining the bone? It sounded like some sex thing, or a music term. I didn't expect like a butcher; I looked similar a placeholder. A butcher moves in an informed, muscular fashion, slides the cooler doors with authority, plucks the production, an bad-mannered arm's-length away, with some ataraxy. I didn't know the first footstep of that dance. The woman looked left, so threw her head back, glancing at the rear of the store. "Is Shawn hither?" she said. Then, blessedly, Lori came up beside me.

"How-do-you-do, sweetie. What'll it be today?"

Sweetie! The adult female looked at me glassily, recentered on Lori, and then went back to the height of her list. "Yes," she breathed, starting over again. "I only need a quarter pound of lean ground beef. I make merely one hamburger."

Lori moved before the sentence ended. One hand to the cooler door, the other to a slice of wax paper.

"How lean is that?"

"Ninety-3 pct," Lori said without breaking step.

"Is that what I want?"

"Some people like a little more than fat." Steady.

The woman looked down into the cooler, placing a finger on her lip. "More fat," she repeated, puzzled. In the weeks to come up I grew to understand that once a customer was looking in the example, the sale was in the hands of the butcher. You worked through the order methodically, answered one question at a time, and used the wrapping time to think a little, to write down prices and answer follow-ups. A little cajoling slowed people down. Praising a cutting created pauses. The trick was to lay in an undercurrent of military orderliness, a sense that precision was pleasure, without existence bossy or abrupt.

"Information technology's just taste," Lori said. "If you lot don't cook information technology too long, lean is practiced, too." She was shoulder deep in the cooler, holding. I saw her human foot tapping the linoleum. Too fast for me, the sale was, I could see, too slow for her.

One of them trims chicken, one butterflies pork chops, some other trims out a special order of tenderloins. I person to a block, ane block per type of meat. The space is tight, only each station is aplenty. It's a globe constantly decorated with signs of the process. A stray thumbprint of blood, a blackening dust of sawed bones, smears of raw fat.

Sometimes Dave stands in the middle of this, wide-legged, proprietary, appearing a little dizzy, and cooks a small slice of lamb or sirloin on a plug-in griddle. Information technology helps with the olfactory property, he says.

There's a skinny kid they call Joe Mack. Sturdy, tanned, sometimes wears a piddling rope necklace, who favors a golf game shirt under his frock and keeps it tucked in. Barely two years in, he takes classes at nighttime. His father is a meat supplier, and possibly for Joe Mack this is a kind of apprenticeship. There is no part of the job he won't exercise, though he does nothing then well every bit work the counter, where the women poke into their ain pocket-size line in front of him. He speaks politely and slowly, he broadens his smiling with every answer so it's broadest as he finishes, at which point he bags the meat and offers to carry information technology to the car. "Meat makes people happy," he says. "Women like it when you lot don't make it the way of their happiness." Butcher, through and through.

James is thicker, but slightly older, arms dotted with tattoos, all concern at the counter, working the front end of the shop, mostly preparing the expensive cuts. I enquire him near the tattoos. "Believe information technology or not," he tells me, "I was a rocker. I was in a pretty solid band, and this was my office-fourth dimension chore. Simply this was something I knew I could get better at." He works the pocketknife upwards, with the grain. "It's not going to go away," he says. "People always demand meat-cutters." Butcher.

Behind the counter is a 30-foot-long walk-in, with two doors that swing open so slowly that anyone darting in with a tray of chops has to stop and wait. Shawn calls it the million-dollar walk-in, the irreplaceable fridge. It was built in the first Kincaid's family store across town lxxx-seven years agone, moved hither one cork-lined wall at a fourth dimension when the shop relocated in 1934. "There isn't plenty cork left in the world for them to build this once again," he said 1 day while we were standing in the cooler. The temperature is a rock-steady 35 degrees. The humidity is seventy per centum, always. This produces a dry cold, and what I came to recall of as a bloody air, ideal for the aging of beefiness. Meat can hang in this freezer for upward to xc days in the aging procedure. Information technology blackens on the exterior, simply it does not rot. Temperature and time interruption downward the fibers in the meat as information technology dries.

At Kincaid's they express mirth at the phenomenon of "wet aging," in which meat is vacuum-sealed for days or weeks. "Information technology's bullshit," Shawn says.

"The whole key to crumbling is evaporation," Dave says. "You let dry air pass freely over the meat. That'due south why the walk-in is so valuable to us. We accept a term here for wet crumbling."

"It'due south called old meat," Shawn says.

On Tuesdays, they break beef. On Wednesdays, they break lamb. A quartered moo-cow, or one-half a lamb, pulled clean of hide, flat on the metal tables in back, sawed into sections, so worked into cuts from there. On Thursdays, they concentrate on the specialty cuts. Fridays generally they get fix for Sat, because on Saturdays, well, they try to sell everything, so nothing sits until Monday, when they intermission everything down and start over again. Each of these days requires a different set up of implements -- the saw, the fillet knife, the cleaver, the sponge, mop, and towel.

I idea I would become sick of it, or disgusted. I'd sort of held my breath when I went in, expecting large pools of blood, tubs of kidneys, brains lying on a table. Merely there is zilch grim about working in a butcher shop. Even the sinkful of tongues made sense to me that day. People were using this stuff. And when meat has a use, a purpose, a destination, it doesn't seem similar a wasteful cultural indulgence. To a butcher, a filet does not expect like a cylinder of night, vino-ruby mankind that runs beneath the spine of a cow; information technology looks like production to be cared for and tended. It looks like someone's dinner. And of class, information technology looks like money.

In that location is no waste. Lifting, toting, trimming, tying -- remarkable economy in every step. Lamb trim gets cut for stew meat. Pork trim made into 5 unlike types of sausage. Beef trim: hamburger. The chicken basic are sold for soup stock, the beef basic packed for dogs. Ham and pork scraps are mixed with pineapple juice in tubs of mayonnaise for ham loaf. The basic compact: Weight is coin.

Fifty-fifty the fat goes to a rendering business firm for grease and soap, though "at that place'southward not even whatever profit in that part," Dave'southward married woman, Vicki, the store's bookkeeper, told me. "We really pay for it to exist taken away. Y'all but can't throw sometime meat away. You lot just--" she turned her head at the thought; no one likes to retrieve about rot. "Well, you just can't."

Everything I touched in the butcher shop was either cold, precipitous, or both. Every surface in the freezer, the Cryo-packs, the meat itself: icy cold. My fingers ached, and I labored through some scut piece of work, mashing gelid tubs of ground ham with my easily, making sausage in an ancient steel tub, vacuum-wrapping the frozen homemade meatballs. I stayed away from the counter. The prospect of those rapid-burn down orders pretty much terrified me, and one thing I knew was you couldn't show uncertainty. No i likes a butcher who balks. Information technology shakes the gut-level confidence in stewardship. I spent my spare fourth dimension continuing in front of the counter, on the customer side, trying to memorize cuts and prices, preparing for a time when I could flex some muscle.

Mark taught the lessons of the grinder. Twenty-six years in the business organisation, arms like water mains, he was a former pastor who had lived in Alaska for more a decade. Butcher. The grinder is a four-foot-long tray, tilted toward a hole in one end. You push the day's trimmings into the pigsty, where information technology feeds into a 16-inch corkscrew blade. Out the other end: hamburger or sausage. I morning, tossing trim onto the tray, he turned on the grinder and said: "Look, the rule is, if you feel annihilation tug, annihilation at all, you striking the button and run." He poked the safe-covered stop button with his thumb. We stood in the walk-in, the compressors humming similar a railroad train. "You put your easily in the air and you run," he said, "like a little girl. I'm serious every bit a sock. This stuff volition humble y'all. Go abroad from information technology. Y'all always run away from trouble in a butcher store."

I liked the knife work, learning to work the heart of the bract -- that section where the knife curves, just where it begins to flatten out -- rather than the tip. I learned not to saw the meat just to cut with a consistent pressure, a single change of direction. Sawing the blade left ragged edges, little pointy stubs of meat, ugly and prone to burning.

I figured I would get cut, and I figured it would be nasty. The knives, marvelously sharp at the get-go of the day, were sharpened by Lori during the lulls. One morning, while trimming chicken, I asked her if there was a pool on when I would get cut. She looked at me like I had just pissed myself. "Why would there be?"

"It'southward going to happen, isn't it? Butchers become cut, right?"

She just wouldn't talk, not almost cuts. None of the butchers would, not while they worked, and especially not while belongings knives. Grab them on a smoke interruption and they might begrudgingly tell you about the time they watched a guy clip off the top third of his band finger on the meat saw, or about hunting for the tip of a thumb in a pile of pork fatty in club to ice it down so it might be reattached.

Dave will talk near final year, when he got his manus defenseless in the cuber, a nasty mouthful of steel teeth designed to gnash the fibers and tendons in the toughest meat. He points to the lesser of his fingers, where the mitt meets the first digit. "I was in upwards to here," he says, "and most of my fingers were no better than hamburger. We only unscrewed the plumbing fixtures and took the whole thing straight into the hospital room. They wanted to pull information technology apart -- they were wacky. I couldn't let them. Vicki unscrewed information technology for them with an Allen wrench. To them information technology looked like a monster. It's an old piece. I didn't want to lose it."

He's left with trenches downward his middle fingers, direct upwards through the nails. He'southward unable to curve them much, and not without hurting. Still, he thinks of himself as lucky. He squeezes them as if they were produce. "I think they set up pretty well," he says. "I can nevertheless cut meat -- what choice do I accept?"

Y'all aren't a butcher if you tin can't deal with people. You're just a meat-cutter. Eventually, I made myself work the counter. I spooned out the hamburger: 1-pound, iv-pound, 9-ounce orders. I stacked and wrapped pork tenderloins for a Moose Lodge cookout. I took an order in French from an aroused Quebecois who couldn't understand why nosotros didn't have roulade ready just then. I rang up beef curt ribs, after Shawn sawed them down, for a kid from Texas. I displayed T-bones, urged people to expect hard at the weak little loin, then held upwards a porterhouse for comparison. I sold hanger steaks, flank steaks, chateaubriand, told people that a Delmonico was only a rib heart, and that nosotros had good ones to evidence them. I parsed out noxiously sticky ground turkey and shaved turkey breast for women toting their children to the swimming pool, and proffered the kids a complimentary bite before I wrapped it. I sold six Kobe steaks to a German guy in for the Indianapolis 500, then up-sold him three buffalo rib eyes just by request him to accept a look at their leanness.

Sales are the punctuating event of a butcher's 24-hour interval. And the butchers themselves were like shape-shifters. In 1 moment, they shouldered hindquarters into the cooler, every bit punch-drunk with the weight of the task as any stonemason, then straightened like attentive librarians the second the bells on the door rang.

They packaged their meats in white freezer wrap and carefully wrote the cut and the prices with a Sharpie, each in his own particular handwriting, a kind of butcher's font, eschewing the bar-coded labels printed at the scales. I was miserable at information technology before I slowed to concentrate on the letters -- earlier I realized this was a message that would speak to the customer from the refrigerator hours after, a reminder of the wealth and promise and exactitude of the butcher shop.

Shawn is breaking a beef quarter. I'thou piling out the cuts, wiping off the bone grit with a towel and stacking them on a tray. While lamb meat is riddled with fat, which must be trimmed in pocket-size upwards flicks, sometimes producing no more a chunk of meat half the size of a cheeseball, beef is more than fully assembled and of a slice. The fatty has to get, only it comes off the blade in strips that you throw in the trim pile like old neckties.

Shawn presses a finger into the hip joint, looking for a spot to set his saw. He's been cut meat for 30 years. He claims that I'm of some use now, and we pass the fourth dimension talking nigh his life as a male child in Jersey, riding effectually the urban center in a car with his aunt, the nun.

"What'd you learn here?" he asks me during a lull. No follow-upwards. No filler. Butcher. I tell him I don't observe myself very disturbed with what I've come across. I'd idea at that place would be organs, and claret, some hint of a larger misery. "It doesn't seem similar a very miserable concern," I tell Shawn.

He shrugs. "I ate raw calf brain on a dare once," he says. "That'southward pretty miserable. Don't exercise that." He works perilously fast, making 1 push with the knife every time, never sawing the meat. I can't help merely admire it at present. "And you gotta remember, this isn't the killing floor." He tilts his head on his huge neck, wipes the tips of his fingers on the chest of his apron, and holds a paw open in a gesture to the whole identify. "That is a rough business right there. Right hither, we're a long way from slaughter. A store similar ours is an intermediate step. We humanize things a little, assistance them see the civilization of--"

He pauses then. A guy in a baseball cap has approached the counter. "Counter!" Shawn shouts. Marker and Lori converge on the auction. And then he looks dorsum to me. "The culture of meat, I suppose you'd telephone call it," he says. "People don't have time to know everything about meat. That's what nosotros do. And we don't have time to know anything else." Intermission. "Counter," he says, softer now. This time he's talking to me.

I rinse my hands, towel off, and approach. I'chiliad dealing with another of these women, the older ones, the ones with the crimped listing and the precise guild. I've been hither a month at present, and I've come to run across how customers similar this are notoriously fair in their expectations. This one is a regular. She likes chicken, boneless and skinless. Two breasts. No more than.

She hands me two potatoes, which I put on the scale before she starts her gild. I drop them into a paper sack and price it. I don't talk. It feels orderly and smart, for us both, I think. It allows her to retrieve longer, to desire the service more than.

This one -- well, she's a dame. Her pilus is washed up smart, her cheeks are rouged, and her jewelry is on the gaudier fringe of elegant. "There you go, dear," I say, placing the potatoes on the counter. "What else tin I become you?" I stare straight at her. There is no demand to concentrate on anything else. I know what's effectually me. I think I even know what she wants.

"My son wants a steak," she says, "but I never buy red meat. What do y'all suggest?"

I hitch my apron and lean forwards, elbows out. I need to know a little nearly her plans. They're grilling, it turns out. They're drinking imported beer. They're eating on her balustrade. She smiles telling me about it.

"I'm thinking rib eye," I tell her. "But big men always remember that."

She laughs. "My son is big, too," she says.

"So the eagle has landed," I say. She laughs one time more. And I have her. "Rib centre it is," I say. I show her the meat, spread wide on my hand, and so wrap it tight like a Christmas present. "Nice meat," I tell her as she pays. "Good choice."

And when she blushes, I ignore it. I'm a butcher. I'yard just giving her what she needs.

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