The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

The receipts were held together with one of those thick tan rubber bands the post office uses on bundled mail.

My mother saves those bands on a doorknob in her kitchen, and apparently she saves her gas slips too.

I found them on a Thursday afternoon in late September, sitting in the passenger seat of her car in her own driveway.

I was only looking for her insurance card, because her plates were due and she had asked me to run the renewal over to the courthouse.

I work in the Kimball County assessor’s office. I have been a clerk there for nineteen years.

The insurance card was there, folded in the owner’s manual. The receipts were underneath it, a stack about as thick as a deck of cards, every one of them curled the way thermal paper curls when it bakes in a glovebox all summer.

I would have put them back. I want to say that plainly. I am not a snoop, and my mother is entitled to keep whatever she wants in her own car.

But the top slip had slid out from under the band, and I read it without meaning to.

Prepaid, fifty-two dollars. Pump two. Ten gallons even. Fuel total, twenty-six dollars and ten cents. Change due, twenty-five dollars and ninety cents.

I read it twice. Then I read the one under it, which was dated a week earlier and said almost exactly the same thing, a few cents different.

Fifty-two dollars in. Ten gallons out. Change due, a little over twenty-six dollars.

My mother has bought ten gallons of gas every Friday morning since my father died.

She calls it a half tank, though it is a little more than that in her car. She pays inside because she does not trust the card reader on the pump.

She read a story in the paper years ago about a skimmer someone found on a pump in Scottsbluff, and that was that.

So she walks in, she hands over cash, and the clerk sets the pump for her. That is how prepay works.

You pay before you pump, and if you pump less than you paid for, the register shows the difference and the clerk hands you your change.

Mom always pumps ten gallons. She stands by the nozzle and watches the gallons roll up, and when it says ten she lets go.

She has done it that way for nine years. She does not look at the dollar side of the pump, only the gallons.

I took the rubber band off right there in her driveway and went through every slip. There were fifty of them.

Every single one said fifty-two dollars prepaid, or fifty-four once gas went up in the summer, and every single one said ten gallons and change due.

I sat there in her car with the door open and the wind coming across from the wheat stubble west of town, and I felt my stomach go hollow. Because I knew who stood behind that register every Friday morning.

His name is Colt. He is my brother’s son, my mother’s only grandson, and he has worked the register at the station on Highway 30 since he came back from a year at the college in Sidney that did not take.

He is twenty-three. He is thin as a fence post, keeps his brown hair buzzed short, and he has a grin that could sell you a car wash in a snowstorm.

When he was little he used to sit on my mother’s lap and play operator with her old headset.

I put the rubber band back on, exactly as it had been. I put the stack back under the manual.

I took the insurance card, shut the glovebox, and went up the walk to my mother’s kitchen door with my hands shaking a little.