The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

The Full Tank

While I was on the phone, Merle had gone into the office. He came back out with a cardboard temporary tag and taped it inside the back window himself, careful, smoothing the corners with his thumb.

Then he got in the driver’s seat of the Marquis and started it.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“She’s sitting on about an eighth,” he said. “Mrs. Arnold never let it get over half. Ride with me.”

So I got in the passenger side, and that old man in his felt hat drove me back across the very highway I had walked over forty-five minutes before, and pulled up to the same pumps where my husband had told me to get out.

He got out, and he filled it up, all the way to the click and then a little more, and he went inside and paid for it himself.

When he came back he handed me the receipt. Fifty-two dollars and some cents.

I tried to give him the forty-one I had in checking, as if that was a thing a person could do with a receipt, and he put his hand flat on the car roof and shook his head.

“That’s not part of the price,” he said. “That’s from Bev and me. A woman shouldn’t have to leave this lot on fumes.”

Then he drove me back over to the lot, got out, and held the driver’s door open for me like I was going to a dance.

Bev came out of the office with a pint canning jar wrapped in a paper towel. Peanut brittle.

She made it every October, she said, the week the weather turned, and Merle ate it till his dentist yelled at him.

“For your girl,” she said. “But not till after the braces come off. Then she can have all she wants.”

I hugged her. I did not plan to. I just did it, and she hugged me back hard, and she smelled like coffee and Jergens lotion, like every church lady I ever loved.

“Go on,” Merle said. “Beat him home.”

I had not told him that part. I had not even known I was thinking it.