The Counter
The bell over the door rang when I went in. The store smelled like coffee and hot dogs turning on the roller, the way it has smelled since I was a girl.
The pale morning light came through the big front window and lit up the snack racks and the counter.
Lavonne looked up first. She is sixty, with short dark hair she has worn the same way for as long as I have known her, and a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck. “Morning, Arliss,” she said. “You brought your mother?”
“I did,” I said. “She’s out in the car.”
Colt turned around from the cigarette rack. His face lit up when he saw me, that big easy grin, and he said, “Hey, Aunt Arliss,” the way he has said it since he could talk.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Then he saw what was in my hand, and the grin went away.
I walked up to the counter and set the stack down in front of the register, right between the two of them.
It made a soft little thud. The rubber band held.
I did not raise my voice. I had promised myself I would not, and I did not. “These are Mom’s receipts,” I said. “Every Friday since the second week of last October. Fifty-one of them. She keeps every one.”
Colt looked down at the stack. He did not say anything. He just looked down at it, and kept looking down at it, and I watched the color go out of his face and then come back red all the way up to his buzzed hair.
Lavonne looked at me for a moment over the top of her clipboard. She did not ask what it was about.
She set the clipboard down, lifted her reading glasses from the chain and put them on, and pulled the stack toward her across the counter.
She slid off the rubber band, set it to one side, and picked up the first slip.
She held it close and read it the whole way down, the way a careful person reads a bill.
Then she set it face up on the counter and picked up the second. She read that one too, all the way down.
Colt stood beside her with his hands flat on the counter, not moving at all.
Behind me, through the big window, I knew my mother could see us. I turned my head a little.