The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

The Arithmetic

I took the slips home. I am not proud of that part either, but I needed to be sure, and I am the kind of person who needs to see a number written down before I will believe it. My job is numbers. Valuations, levies, square footage.

I spread them out on my own kitchen table in rows of ten, oldest to newest. The first one was dated the second Friday of October last year.

There were two Fridays missing, the week of the Christmas blizzard and the week Mom had her cataract done.

Fifty slips. I ran them on the old adding machine I keep in the hutch, the same model we used at the office before the computers.

I ran them twice because I did not want to believe it the first time.

One thousand, three hundred twelve dollars and forty cents. That was the change due, added up.

Money my mother handed across that counter every Friday, money the register said belonged to her, money she never saw again.

To my mother, that money is her propane in January. It is the new glasses she has been putting off. It is the tithe envelope she fills every Sunday whether she can spare it or not.

My husband came in from the elevator around four. It was early fall harvest, and he had been running the scale since six that morning for the farmers bringing in proso millet.

He saw the slips on the table and stopped in the doorway with his cap still on.

“What’s all this?” he asked. I told him. He picked up two slips and read them the way he reads a scale ticket, carefully, holding them out at arm’s length because he will not wear his glasses at work.

He set them down and was quiet for a long minute. My husband is not a talker.

Then he said, “That boy is going to have to answer for that. You want me to go down there with you?”

“No,” I said. “I think this has to be me. But thank you.” He nodded, and I could see he did not like it, but he respected it.

“Then what are you going to do?” he asked. “Call Emory?”

That was the question I had been chewing on all afternoon. Emory is my younger brother.

He works as a pumper on the oil leases north of town, driving from well to well in his pickup, checking gauges and tanks. He is a good, steady man.

But Emory married Dorcas, and Dorcas has never once in twenty-three years admitted that her son did anything wrong.

When Colt was nine he broke a neighbor’s basement window with a baseball, and Dorcas told the neighbor the window was cracked already.

If I called Emory, I knew exactly what would happen. Dorcas would hear it before he hung up the phone, and by suppertime there would be a reason.

Grandma must have miscounted. Grandma must have told him to keep it. Grandma wanted him to have a little extra.

And my mother would hear it, too, eventually. That was the part I could not stand. Because I know my mother.

If she learned Colt was in some kind of trouble, she would not be angry. She would go to the bank and take out whatever he needed and hand it to him.

She would pay his debts out of her savings to keep him from being ashamed, and she would never say a word about the twenty-six dollars a week, and he would learn exactly nothing.

“Not Emory,” I said. “Not yet. And not the sheriff, either. It’s a boy stealing from his grandmother. I don’t want him in the paper. I want him to stop, and I want her money back, and I want him to have to look at what he did.”

My husband turned one of the slips over in his fingers. “Lavonne,” he said.

He was right, and I had already known it. Lavonne Brucker has owned that station for twenty-two years.

She bought it from the man who ran it before her when everyone said a woman could not keep a station going on the highway with the interstate a mile off. She has kept it going.

Lavonne sold my father his last tank of gas, the week before his heart gave out.

She sent a ham to the house after the funeral and came to the visitation in her work clothes because she had come straight from the counter.

She is a fair woman, and she does not tolerate a thief.

It was her register and her station and her name on that receipt.

Whatever Colt had done, he had done it on her counter, with her money drawer, to one of her oldest customers. She had a right to know before anyone else did.