The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

She was sitting in the passenger seat of her white sedan, and when she saw Colt’s face through the glass, she smiled and lifted her hand and waved at him.

It was the same little wave she gives at church and at the post office and across the street at the grocery.

A happy wave. A grandmother’s wave. She had no idea in the world what was on that counter.

Colt saw it. I know he did, because his eyes went to the window and came straight back down. He could not lift his hand to wave back.

He could not lift his head. My mother kept waving for a while, and then she put her hand back on her purse, still smiling.

Lavonne picked up the third slip. She held it up toward the window to catch the light, because thermal paper fades.

She read it out loud, very quietly. “Prepaid fifty-two. Ten gallons. Change due, twenty-six dollars even.”

She set it down with the other two, in a neat row. Then she took off her reading glasses and looked at Colt for a long time.

Nobody said anything. The hot dogs turned on the roller. A truck went by on the highway.

“Colt,” she said at last. “Did Henrietta Weidemann ever get twenty-six dollars back from you? One time?”

He shook his head. He was still looking down at the counter.

“Say it,” Lavonne said. Not loud. Just firm, the way you would talk to a calf that would not go through a gate. “Look at me and say it.”

He lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “No, ma’am,” he said. “She never did.”

Lavonne nodded once. Then she reached under the register and brought out a pen and a sheet of paper from the folder she keeps under there.

I had seen that folder before. It is where she writes down drawer shortages and the drive-offs her clerks are supposed to cover.

She turned the sheet around on the counter so it faced him. It was a plain lined sheet with columns she had ruled by hand: date, amount, balance, initials.

At the top she wrote, in her neat square printing, “Henrietta Weidemann,” and under it, “$1,338.30.”

She set the pen on top of it. “Before I say another word,” she said, “you tell me why. And you tell your aunt, too. She deserves to hear it.”

His Reason

He told us. It came out slow, standing there at his own register, with his grandmother sitting out in her car forty feet away.

He had taken out a payday loan in Sidney the winter before last, for a transmission on his pickup. Four hundred dollars.

When it came due he could not cover it, so he took out another at a different place to pay the first, and then another online, and the fees kept stacking up on top of each other.

By last October he owed close to sixteen hundred dollars across three of them, and he was paying fees every two weeks that did not touch what he owed.

He was afraid to tell his folks. He knew what his dad would say. He knew his mother would make it worse by making it nothing.

“And then Grandma came in that Friday,” he said, “and she held out her cash and said ten gallons, like always. And I just rang fifty-two. I don’t even know why. And she counted out two twenties, a ten and two ones and handed it to me, and went out and pumped her ten.”

“And the register showed twenty-six dollars change due,” Lavonne said.

“Yes, ma’am. And I just kept it. I told myself I’d pay it back before she ever noticed.” He swallowed. “I told myself she never reads the receipts. She never reads anything at the pump. I told myself she’d never know.”

He looked at me then, finally. “I didn’t think anybody would ever read them,” he said.

I could have said a hundred things. I had rehearsed some of them lying awake Thursday night. Instead I said the only one that mattered. “She didn’t read them, Colt. She trusted you. I read them.”

He put his face in his hands for a second. Lavonne let him. Then she tapped the pen on the sheet.