It’s the place, Bryan tells me, where Jackson residents come when they need a shopping mall. A place to find used cars and economy-class prostitutes. A place where there are, in fact, no falls.

But at eight in the morning on a cloudless fall day, the Maveriks gas station on the corner of US-91 and Sunnyside Road is somehow cheery, with kind sunlight glowing in the liquid canisters of the slurpee mixers, and sweet steam issuing from the four-urn coffee station. In the back right corner, a corner divider is built chin-high. Behind it, a petite woman with a hatchet-shaped face, bottle-blonde ponytail, and eyes burning bright behind a thin, deep mask of kohl liner wears an apron and crackles a waxed paper bag. She’s surrounded by a sugar-scented fog, so palpably strong as to be almost visible.

At the level of her mouth, a tray of muffins is missing just one of its lineup. The tops, big around as a saucer, are encrusted with marble-sized crystals and pulverized flakes of rock sugar. I’m not hungry but I find myself gazing toward the little jury-rigged kitchen, like a thief staring at a pie cooling on a window sill. She meets my eye and smiles with a mother’s welcome. Feeling somehow guilty, I retire shyly to the coffee urns.

As I’m filling my flask, a sturdy woman with a sturdy coat and a close-cropped, utilitarian haircut approaches the kitchen and leans over it. I’d like to buy some muffins, she states. The blonde woman smiles and murmurs assent. What kind of flavors, the sturdy wants to know—I see cherry? And peach, and butterscotch, says the blonde woman. The waxed paper crackles again, the smell rushes up as the vapors are shoved about by hands cracking a moist stump politically, so as to preserve its integrity, from among the others in the pan.

The morning light picks out every line like a Rembrandt—the solid beadboard veneer, the sugar crystals, the brush strokes in the ponytail—and separates the steam into a molecular tulle that wraps them all in warm fragrance. The brand names and advertsing marquetry fades into a praimry-colored patchwork that offsets the soft, illuminated reality.

My camera phone was in my pocket, and I might have pulled it out to take a picture. But I was sleepy, and cold, and hadn’t had any coffee yet, so I left it there.

And I didn’t get the shot.