I picked up the old cash box from beside my chair and set it on the table between the tri tip and the potato salad. It was gray steel, dented at the corner, with a little brass lock and a faded sticker that read Kern County Gas and Go, Station One. I had carried it out of that first station in 1974 on the day I bought the place from my uncle. I took a small key from my shirt pocket and turned the lock, and the lid sprang up with a creak. “Pop,” Jacob said quietly, “what is in the box?” I tipped it toward him, and he looked in. For a moment he said nothing at all.
Inside lay a cashier check, a deed, and a photograph. The check was made out to Jacob Reyes, in the amount of thirty one thousand, two hundred dollars. The deed was for a little yellow house in Fresno, two bedrooms and a porch, paid in full. And the photograph showed me at twenty four years old, in a blue work shirt, standing in front of a single gas pump with my arm around my uncle. “The check is your student loans,” I said. “All of them, to the penny. The deed is a place to live. The photograph is so you remember where we came from.” Jacob had both hands pressed over his mouth, and his shoulders were shaking.
Todd laughed, but it came out thin and wrong. “Earl, what is this, a stunt? You told us you lost everything.” “I told you nothing,” I said. “You told me I was going broke. You told your wife, and your son, and half of Bakersfield.” I took a second paper from the box and laid it flat. “This is the closing statement for the sale of my forty stations to Pacific Fuel Partners. Thirty one million dollars. I signed it on the first of March.” Michelle read the number twice. Then she looked up at her husband, and the expression on her face was one I had last seen on her mother, in 1996, at a kitchen table, just before the divorce.
An old steel cash box from a first gas station opened at Sunday dinner held what a grandfather had saved for his grandson.
“Who is Brittany Lowe?” Michelle asked again, very quietly. This time Todd did not laugh. He sat very still, with his fork on the plate, and for a long time the only sound was the ticking of the clock above the stove. Then he said, “She is nobody. A friend.” “A friend in Sacramento,” said Michelle. “With forty eight deposits from my father.” She stood up from the table. She is a short woman, my daughter, with her mother chin, and I have never been prouder of her than I was in that moment. “I will be staying with Jacob tonight,” she said. “You can explain yourself to my lawyer.”
Todd tried to reach for her arm, and Jacob stood up. My grandson is six feet two inches tall, and he does not look like a person to argue with. “Dad,” he said, gently. “Stop.” That was all. Todd dropped his hand.
I will say this for the boy, he did not strike his father, or shout, or call him a name. He just stood there with his arms at his sides, tired and calm, a young man who had worked nights stocking shelves for four years while his father bought a Lexus. “Pop gave you twenty four thousand dollars for my school,” Jacob said. “I want you to hear me say that I know every cent.”
I turned to my son in law. “Todd, here is the way it will go. My lawyer in Los Angeles has already spoken to a lawyer in Sacramento. You will repay twenty four thousand dollars to Jacob, with interest, within sixty days. You will sell the Lexus. You will sign a statement describing what happened to the money. If you do all of that, I will not file a report.” Todd swallowed. “And if I do not?” “Then I will,” I said, “and I will enjoy it a great deal less than you imagine.” He signed the paper at the kitchen table that night with a borrowed pen, and he did not look at any of us.
He paid in forty one days. I give him that. He sold the car and the golf clubs, moved to an apartment in Rosedale, and has not, to my knowledge, spoken to Brittany Lowe since. Michelle filed for divorce in the spring. She lives in the little yellow house now, with her son in the second bedroom and a cat she adopted from the shelter. On Sunday afternoons I drive over with tri tip, and the three of us sit on the porch, and nobody mentions Todd. Some nights Michelle forgets and laughs, and Jacob and I look at each other across the porch and say nothing. It is the best sound I have heard in years.
With the rest of the money, I did what my uncle would have done. I bought back the first station, which a chain had let run down, and I reopened it with the original sign and the original pump, and I hired four high school boys from the neighborhood who needed jobs. I started a scholarship at Fresno State for students who work nights, in the name of Jacob, though he made me promise to leave his surname off the plaque. Last June I handed the first check to a young woman in a Walmart vest, and she cried so hard I thought she would never stop.
On the first day the station reopened, I wore my blue work shirt with the name stitched on the pocket. Jacob came by after his shift at the bank, where he now works as a loan officer, a position I did not arrange and have never mentioned to anyone. He stood with me at pump number one and pumped a gallon of gas into the truck of a stranger, the way I did in 1966. The old cash box sat on the counter, open, empty, with the sticker still on its side. “Pop,” he said, “what are you going to put in it?” I looked at the boy. “Your first paycheck,” I said.