The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

Sunday After Church

Colt told her the second Sunday in December. I did not know he was going to do it that day. Nobody did.

It was a bright, still afternoon, cold but sunny, with snow on the ground from the week before and the sky that hard winter blue.

We had all come back to Mom’s after church for dinner, the way we do once a month, Emory and Dorcas and my husband and me.

After the dishes, Colt asked if he could talk to Grandma by himself. Dorcas started to say something, and Emory touched her arm, and she stopped.

We all went into the front room. I could hear them through the doorway anyway. It is a small house.

He sat down across from her at the kitchen table, where she and I had sat with our coffee in September.

He had his hands folded in front of him like a boy in church. He told her all of it, plainly, the loans and the fifty-two dollars and the change due.

“Every Friday, Grandma,” he said. “For a year. I took your change. Twenty-six dollars, every time. It came to more than thirteen hundred dollars. Aunt Arliss found the receipts in your glovebox. I’ve been paying it back out of my check. It’s almost done.”

It was quiet in that kitchen for so long that I got up to go in. My husband put a hand on my arm. I sat back down.

Then I heard my mother’s chair scrape. I heard her get up, slow, the way she does now, and come around the table. I leaned so I could see through the doorway.

She was standing beside his chair with her hand on the back of his buzzed head, the way she used to hold him when he was a baby with an earache.

He had his face against her sweater. He was crying, and so was she, quietly.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Why didn’t you just ask me? I’d have given it to you. You know I would have given you anything.”

“I know, Grandma,” he said into her sweater. “That’s why I couldn’t ask.”

She stood there and held his head for a long time. Then she said, “Well. You’ll finish paying it back. And then we’ll never speak of it again.” And she bent down and kissed the top of his head, and went to the stove and put the coffee back on.

I looked over at Emory. He was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Dorcas was looking at her lap. Nobody said anything. After a while, Mom called us all back in for pie.

The Last Line

The last payment came the first Friday of April. Lavonne called me at the office. “Balance says zero,” she said. “He initialed it. Come get your sheet.”

I stopped in on my way home. The sun was still up, the evenings were getting long again, and the fields west of town had that first faint green of winter wheat coming on.

Lavonne had the sheet on the counter, every line filled in, the last one reading zero.

She had paper-clipped it to the front of the rubber-banded stack of receipts, the one I had brought her back in September. “Give it all to your mother,” she said. “Or burn it. Up to her.”

Colt was out at the pumps, filling a rancher’s flatbed. He waved at me through the big front window. I waved back. Lavonne watched him a moment over her reading glasses.

“He’s a good worker,” she said. “Better than before, if you want to know the truth. I might put him back on the register next year. Might.” She smiled a little. “Don’t tell him.”

I took the stack home to my mother. She looked at the sheet for a long time, running her knuckly finger down the column of initials.

Then she put the rubber band back around it, opened the drawer by her stove, and laid it in there with her church bulletins.

The coffee can money went into her savings at the bank, every dollar of it. One thousand, three hundred thirty-eight dollars and thirty cents.

She used some of it in May for the new glasses she had been putting off.

She does not need to save her receipts anymore, but she still does. Old operators keep records.

And Colt paid back every dollar from his own checks, and now he walks out to pump his grandma’s gas every Friday.