The Gas Receipts in Mom’s Glovebox

The Car

I walked back out into the cold daylight with the receipts in one hand and sixty dollars in my pocket. My mother had the window down. She was beaming.

“Was Colt busy?” she asked. “He looked so serious in there. I waved and waved.”

“He was busy, Mom,” I said. I got in and put the receipts back in the glovebox, under the owner’s manual, where she keeps them. “Lavonne had him doing some paperwork.”

I started the car. Before I could pull out, the door of the station opened and Colt came out.

He walked across the lot to pump two with his hands in his pockets, and he leaned down to my mother’s open window.

“Hi, Grandma,” he said. His voice was thick. “You look real nice today.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, and she reached up and patted his cheek through the window, the way she has since he was a baby. “You need a coat. It’s cold out. You’ll catch your death in that little shirt.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He stood there a moment longer, and I thought he was going to say something else, but he didn’t.

He straightened up and tapped the roof of the car twice, the way men out here do, and stepped back.

We drove to the grocery. My mother hummed a hymn the whole way, “Blessed Assurance,” a little off key.

I held the steering wheel with both hands and did not say a word, because if I had opened my mouth I would have cried.

My Brother

Emory came to my door that afternoon, around three. He was still in his work clothes, his pumper’s coveralls and his oil-stained cap, and I could see his pickup in my drive with the tank gauges still rattling around on the dash.

“Colt called me,” he said, standing on the step. “From the station. On his break. He told me all of it.”

I let him in. My husband got up from the recliner and shook his hand and went out to the shop to give us room.

Emory sat down at my kitchen table, right where the slips had been on Thursday, and put his hands flat on it.

“Fifty-one weeks,” he said. “Off Mom. My boy.” He shook his head slowly. “I should have seen it. I knew he was short. I knew something was wrong with him this year, and I thought it was a girl, or that truck.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m his dad.” He looked up at me. “Why didn’t you call me, Arliss? Why’d you go to Lavonne?”

I told him the truth, because he deserved it. “Because I was afraid of what Dorcas would say,” I said. “And I was afraid that if Mom found out from anybody but Colt, she’d go to the bank and pay off his loans herself and never say another word about it.”

Emory was quiet for a long time. Then he nodded. “She would,” he said. “Both of them would.” He rubbed his face. “Dorcas already started. Said Mom must have told him to keep it. I told her to stop. First time in twenty-three years I said that to her about that boy.”

He reached across the table and put his rough hand over mine.

My little brother, who used to follow me to the creek with a coffee can full of minnows. “Thank you for not making it the sheriff,” he said. “And thank you for not letting it go.”

“Lavonne’s got a payback sheet,” I told him. “A hundred a check.”

“I know. He told me. I offered to cover it.” Emory almost smiled. “He said no. He said Lavonne would know if it was my money, and so would he. He said it had to come out of his own check or it didn’t count.”