The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

Lavonne’s Terms

“Here’s how this goes,” Lavonne said. “You’re off my register as of right now. You don’t touch my drawer again. You’ll stock, you’ll run the pumps, you’ll clean the restrooms, and you’ll do the car wash till it freezes. Same hours, same pay.”

Colt nodded. He did not argue. I think he had expected to be fired, and maybe worse.

“Every payday,” Lavonne went on, “a hundred dollars comes out of your check and goes onto this sheet. I write it down, you initial it, and I hand the cash to your aunt for your grandmother. Every two weeks, until the balance says zero. That’s about fourteen checks. You’ll be done by spring.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“You’ll go to the bank Monday and talk to them about those loans. Not to borrow more. To see what can be done. If you need somebody with you, I’ll go.” She paused. “I’ve seen boys drown in those places. You won’t be one of them.”

She picked up the pen and held it out to him. “And one more thing,” she said. “From now on, when your grandmother pulls in on a Friday morning, you don’t wait for her to come inside. You walk out there and pump her gas. Every Friday. You do it yourself.”

Colt took the pen. His hand was not steady. He signed his name at the bottom of the sheet, under the number, and then he wrote the first line himself: today’s date, and a hundred dollars, and his initials.

“I’ve got sixty in my wallet,” he said. “I’ll bring the rest Monday.”

“Then put sixty down,” Lavonne said, “and we’ll call it a start.”

He took out his wallet and laid three twenties on the counter. Twenties like my mother’s, I thought, or near enough.

Lavonne crossed out the hundred, wrote sixty, initialed it herself, and slid the bills across the counter to me.

I picked them up. I did not count them. I folded them once and put them in my fleece pocket.

Lavonne squared up the stack of receipts, put the rubber band back around it, and handed it to me too. “You keep these,” she said. “Your mother saved them. They’re hers.”

Then she put her reading glasses back on the chain and looked at me, and her face softened. “I’m sorry, Arliss,” she said. “It happened on my counter. I should have caught it.”

“You couldn’t have,” I said. “The drawer balanced every time. That’s how he did it.”

“Still,” she said. She looked out the window at my mother. “Does she know?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Lavonne turned to Colt. “Then that’s yours, too,” she said. “Not today. But you’ll tell her. You, not your aunt, not your dad. When you’re ready, and before the balance gets to zero.”

He nodded. He was crying a little by then, standing in his red polo behind a counter he was not allowed to work anymore, and he did not try to hide it.