The Dollar on the Legion Bar
“It was my ticket, Deb,” Tammy said, with the nozzle still in her Equinox and her eyes on the numbers rolling past on the pump. “You didn’t put in that week.”
It was a Thursday afternoon at the Kwik Trip on the edge of town, the wind coming off the bean fields hard enough to rattle the price sign.
I had my apron rolled up on the seat of the truck and forty minutes before my shift.
I had been trying to catch her for five days.
I had called her twice on Saturday and once on Sunday, and I had driven past her house on Tuesday night like some kind of teenager, slow, with my headlights low.
“I put my dollar under your coaster,” I said. “Same as always on a busy night. Same as the last hundred busy nights.”
Tammy shook her head at the pump. She had her reading glasses pushed up into that frosted bob she has worn since our senior year, and her mouth was set in a line I had seen maybe three times in thirty years.
“I didn’t see any dollar,” she said. “I bought it with my own two. I scratched it by myself. It’s mine.”
The pump clicked off. She hung up the nozzle, screwed the cap on, and got in the car without looking at me once.
Not when she said it, and not after. Thirty years, and she couldn’t find my face.
I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets until a man in a seed cap honked at me to move so he could get at the pump.
I lifted a hand to say sorry. I didn’t know him. I knew almost everybody, and I didn’t know him, and for some reason that was the thing that made my eyes sting.
I am Deb Schmitz. I am forty-seven years old, and I have waited tables at the American Legion in our town for nineteen years.
Our town has eleven hundred people, one stoplight that blinks yellow after nine, a grain elevator, and a Legion with the best walleye between Mankato and the Iowa line.
Tammy Kranz has been my best friend since the seventh grade, when she sat down next to me on the bus because I was the only girl who didn’t laugh at her perm.
That is the whole reason. Some friendships start for big reasons. Ours started because I didn’t laugh.
The ticket was her idea. It was the fall I was seventeen and she had just turned eighteen, and we were sitting in her mother’s Buick in the Cenex lot with a bag of sunflower seeds between us and nowhere to go.
“I’m legal now,” Tammy said, like she had been elected to something. “I can buy a scratch-off. Put in a dollar and we’ll go halves.”
I dug a crumpled dollar out of my jeans. She went in and came back out with a two-dollar ticket, a red and gold one with a pot of coins on it, and we scratched it on the dashboard with a dime from her ashtray.
It was a loser. We laughed so hard I got sunflower salt in my eye. Then Tammy got serious all of a sudden, the way she could, and held out her hand across the seat.
“Every week,” she said. “A dollar from you and a dollar from me. And anything we ever win, we split right down the middle. Even if it’s a million. Even if one of us is mad at the other one. Deal?”