“Honey, what is your name?” I asked. The girl pulled her hood back. She was a thin little thing with a ponytail and chapped hands. “Dani Reyes, sir. I worked the register at the Russellville station for two years. I am so sorry. I did not know what I was doing was wrong until last week.” The deputy held his flashlight low, and I sat on the trailer tongue beside the boat with my work shirt buttoned to the collar. “Take your time,” I told her. “I have all night, and I am not in a hurry to be angry.”
She told it in pieces. A year and a half ago, Cody had come to the station after hours and asked her to do him a favor. He had a friend who gave him scratch off tickets in bulk, he said, and he needed somebody to scratch them in the pump room and bring the winners to the lottery terminal. Fifty dollars an hour, cash. The tickets were bought on the account of the station and never paid for. When a ticket won, Dani cashed it and gave Cody the money. When it lost, the cost stayed on my books. “He said it was a loophole,” she said. “He said you did not mind.”
“Whose idea was the ledger?” the deputy asked. Dani looked at her hands. “Brittany wrote it. She keeps everything neat. She said if anybody ever asked, the numbers would show the station was losing money, and the old man would never question it.” I felt something go quiet inside me, the way a pump goes quiet when the tank is full, with a small click and a long breath afterward. Fifty years in the business had taught me to recognize that sound, and it was never the sound of good news. The name on the inside cover of the ledger was in a looping hand I knew from a thousand Christmas cards. Brittany Burkhalter. The girl who had told me to stop wearing the shirts of my wife.
A gas station man in a patched work shirt learns whose name is on a secret ledger, and what kind of family he is really leaving his name to.
The truck of Cody pulled in at a quarter to eleven. He climbed out in his marina polo shirt, the one with the little fish on the pocket, saw the patrol cars, and froze with his keys in one hand. Brittany stepped out of the passenger side behind him, in a quilted vest, her phone already at her ear. “Grandpa Otis,” Cody called. His voice cracked. “What is going on? Why are the police here?” I stood. I am eighty years old, and my knees creak, but I walked across that lot as straight as I could. I held out the ledger and I opened it to the inside cover.
Brittany tried to speak first, because she always did. “Otis, this is a misunderstanding. We were trying to protect the business from you. You are old and you were going to be taken advantage of.” I almost laughed. “I sold the business six weeks ago, honey. For twelve point eight million. I thought you might want to hear that from me, but you were too busy telling the room about my shirt.” The color left her face in one long pour. Cody sat down on the bumper of his truck and put his head in his hands.
Garrison walked me through the pump room afterward with a flashlight, past the cot and the space heater and the cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling. There were seventeen hundred scratched tickets, sorted by date with colored paper clips. Brittany had labeled every box in her pretty handwriting. I picked one up and noticed that the date on top was the week Mavis would have turned seventy nine. I put it down quickly. Whatever else I felt that night, I felt sure that my wife would have taken one look at those neat labels and said, Otis, that girl is bright enough to run a bank, and bright enough to rob one.
The deputy was kind about it. He read them their rights while Dani cried quietly in a blanket, and Garrison from the oil company stood in the doorway of the pump room holding a clipboard, looking embarrassed to be present. I asked if Cody could speak to me first. The deputy nodded, and I walked my grandson out past the pumps, where the old sign still said Burkhalter Fill-Up in faded red. Cody wept openly. “Grandpa, I owed money on the boat and the house. Brittany said it was only borrowing. I never thought the girl would get hurt.”
“You can start by telling the truth,” I said. “All of it, to the sheriff, tonight.” He looked up with red eyes. “Will you hate me?” I thought about Mavis, who raised that boy on cornbread and Sunday school. “I will not hate you,” I said. “But I will not rescue you either. Rescuing you is how we got here.” He nodded slowly and walked back to the deputy with his shoulders squared. It was the first brave thing he had done in ten years.
Brittany took a plea in February. Cody testified against her and got probation with a repayment order. I paid back the lottery commission myself, four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, because the name on the station had been my name for fifty years. Then I sat down with Dani at the Catfish Hole and asked what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to be a nurse. I set up a scholarship in the name of Mavis, and Dani started classes at Arkansas Tech in the fall.
At the sentencing I wore my gray work shirt, the one with the red patch that says Otis, and I sat in the front row. The judge looked at it for a long moment, then at me, and she nodded. Last Easter, Cody and I ate ham at my table on Lake Dardanelle, just the two of us and the bass shaped mailbox. He asked if he could wear one of the old shirts to work at the marina. I handed him the one with the best stitching, and he buttoned it all the way up, as proud as any man I have ever seen.