I drove to that station early, before anybody else, and I let myself in with the key I had not yet given back, and I went straight to the little office over the bay.
Because that city fellow who bought the place, who never pumped a tank in his life, did not know the one thing thirty-one years had taught me. There was a camera over the register, an old one, wired in by the man who owned the station before him, and it recorded to a box in the back that the new owner never even knew was there.
I pulled the tape from the night the drawer came up eighty dollars light, and there it was, plain as day, the day boy he put on the register slipping bills into his own pocket while he thought no one was watching, the boy the owner never once thought to check.
I made a copy. Then I put it in an envelope and drove home and ironed my good shirt again, and I waited for Saturday.
The lunch was a fine spread. Thirty-one years of service, a banner and a sheet cake, the district people down from the office, all smiles, none of them knowing their new manager had run an old man off over eighty dollars he never touched.
When the manager stood up to say his few words about me, I stood up too, and I asked if I might show everyone something first.
I played the tape.
The room went quiet. The district people leaned in. And they watched the day boy steal the money, and they watched the date stamp, and they understood, all at once, what the man they had put in charge had done.
The manager went the color of ash. He started to talk and there was nothing to say. The district people walked him out that afternoon, and they turned to me and asked, in front of everybody, if I would come back.
I told them the truth. My hands do not work like they did. But I would come back long enough to train the young folks right, on my own terms, at a wage that respected thirty-one years, and they said yes to every word of it.
The day boy paid the eighty dollars back, and a good deal more, and the sheriff the manager had threatened me with had a word with him instead.
I have thought a good deal, these last days, about how easy it would have been to just sign the paper and go. That is what they count on, men like that. That an old worker will be too tired, or too proud, or too afraid to fight, and will slink off quiet and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not about to let a stranger take mine over money I never touched.
Thirty-one years I helped stranded folks off that road. It turned out the road looked after me too, in the end, through an old camera a careless man forgot to look for. My name is clean. It was always clean. Now the whole district knows it.