The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

Coffee at Mom’s Table

Mom was at the sink, rinsing out the percolator. She is eighty-two and still drinks her coffee out of the same tan stoneware cups she got with green stamps when I was in grade school.

She had the radio on low to the gospel hour out of Cheyenne.

“Did you find it, honey?” she asked. I held up the insurance card and she said, “Good. I knew it was in there somewhere. Sit down, I just made a fresh pot and there’s apple pie from Wednesday.”

I sat. She cut me a piece bigger than I wanted, the way she always does, and poured two cups.

She has hands that are mostly knuckles now, but they are still quick. Thirty-one years of plugging cords into a switchboard will do that.

My mother ran the telephone switchboard in Kimball until the dial system came through, and then she stayed on with the phone company in the office until she retired.

I tried to sound easy. I stirred my coffee for longer than it needed. “Mom, what do you usually hand Colt on a Friday? For your gas?”

“Oh, whatever he tells me.” She waved her hand. “Fifty-some. It went up in the summer. Gas is just terrible anymore, Arliss. Your father would have had a fit.”

“And you pump ten gallons.”

“Ten gallons. Same as always.” She looked at me over her cup. “Why? Is the car using too much? Emory said the tires looked low.”

“No, the car’s fine,” I said, and I hated how my voice sounded. “I was just wondering. Does Colt give you anything back?”

She laughed, not the least bit worried. “Give me back what? He gives me a receipt and he carries my bag out to the car if I’ve bought milk. He’s such a good boy with me, Arliss. He always gets my door.”

Then she told me, the way she tells it every time, about how Colt stopped by in August with a sack of sweet corn from a stand out on the county road, and shucked it for her on the back step because her hands were bad that week.