The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

Friday

I did not sleep well Thursday. I kept thinking about the slips, and about Colt’s grin, and about my mother on her back step watching him shuck sweet corn.

I lay there and asked the Lord to keep me from saying anything I would have to take back.

On Friday I went to work as usual. At about ten in the morning I walked out to the parking lot on my break and called my mother, just to hear how she was. She told me she had already been for her gas.

“Colt was there,” she said, pleased. “He said I look nice in my blue sweater. Fifty-two dollars again, honey. I don’t know how people with big trucks manage.”

I closed my eyes standing beside my car. Fifty-two dollars. Ten gallons. Another twenty-six dollars gone, and it had happened while I was sitting at my desk entering a farm valuation two miles away.

“Mom,” I said, “how about I take you for your groceries tomorrow morning? I’ll drive your car. It needs to be run a little anyway. We’ll top off the tank while we’re out and save you a trip next week.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said, the way she always says it, and then, “What time?” I told her I would be there at a quarter to nine. She said she would have the coffee on.

On my way home from work that afternoon, I stopped at Mom’s and took Friday’s slip out of her glovebox. Fifty-two dollars prepaid.

Ten gallons. Change due, twenty-five dollars and ninety cents. I slid it under the rubber band on top of the others.

Fifty-one slips. One thousand, three hundred thirty-eight dollars and thirty cents. I wrote the total on the back of an envelope and kept it in my purse.

Saturday Morning

Saturday came up gray and cold, the way a late September morning can out here. There was frost on the windshields at seven and gone by eight.

The wind had laid down for once, and the sky over the stubble fields was a flat pale white from edge to edge.

I put on my burgundy fleece jacket, the one my husband bought me at the farm store last fall, and drove over to Mom’s.

She had the coffee on, as promised, and she had her purse ready on the kitchen table with her grocery list folded inside it.

Then she put on her good coat and we went out to her car, a white sedan she has kept spotless for eleven years.

I drove. She sat in the passenger seat with her purse on her lap and her hands folded on top of it, and she looked out the window at everything, the way she does, naming who lived in each house now and who had lived there before.

The station sits on Highway 30 at the east end of town, with the grain elevator rising behind it and the interstate exit a mile south.

It has four pumps under a canopy, a little store with a big front window, and a car wash nobody uses after October.

I pulled up at pump two, Mom’s pump. It was five minutes after nine.

Through the big window I could see Colt behind the register in his red station polo, and Lavonne beside him with a clipboard, checking off a delivery.

“Stay put, Mom,” I said. “I’ll get the gas. I’ll just be a minute inside after.”

“Don’t you pay for that,” she said. “I have money.” I told her it was my treat this week, and she clicked her tongue at me but let it go.

I got out and swiped my own card at the pump, the one she does not trust. I set it for ten gallons.

I stood there in the cold gray daylight and watched the gallons roll up, the way she does, and the dollar side read twenty-six dollars and twenty cents when it stopped.

Then I opened the passenger door, leaned past my mother, and took the stack of receipts out of the glovebox.

She looked at them, and at me, and I said, “Just some paperwork for Lavonne, Mom. I’ll be right back.”