He walked up to my counter at twenty to eleven with both fists shut.
He opened them over the glass and counted the COINS out twice before he’d say what he wanted.
Like the pile might come out bigger on the second pass.
I counted along with him.
It came to two dollars and eighty-six cents.
Mostly NICKELS.
“That won’t buy a whole lot, hon,” I said.
He didn’t argue.
He laid one hand flat over the money like the wind might take it.
His eyes went up to the menu sheet taped over the fryer and stayed there.
“Grill goes off in twelve minutes,” I said.
He nodded at the sheet.
He was nine, maybe.
A gray hooded sweatshirt hung halfway to his knees.
The cuffs were rolled three times.
His hair was wet down and combed flat with his fingers, probably at the drinking fountain by the shoe rental.
Then he put one finger on the cheapest line up there.
The plain hot dog. Two-fifty.
He read my name off my tag before he asked.
“Tina, could you WRAP it up so I can carry it?”
He didn’t want the red plastic basket.
He wanted it in FOIL.
I’ve run the snack bar at Pla-Mor Lanes in Ottumwa for nine years of league nights.
I know what foil means at that hour.
It means the food isn’t for the kid holding the money.
“Name for the ticket?” I said.
“Dustin.”
A big man in his sixties sat at the far table.
His table was under the pinball machine nobody’s plugged in since before my divorce.
White mustache. Orange county road crew coat.
A basket of fries sat in front of him that he hadn’t touched.
He had been working on the same cup of coffee for an hour.
Somewhere in the middle of the counting, he quit lifting it.
He wasn’t looking at the boy.
He was looking out the front glass at the LOT.
A small hatchback sat under the one pole light that still works.
The windows on it had gone white from the inside.
That kind of fog takes people sitting in there breathing a long, long time.
“Wrap it.”
I turned around.
He hadn’t raised his voice one bit.
“And bag up MINE WITH IT.”
He said it like a man reading back something he’d settled an hour ago.
Then he laid two tens on the table, folded together.
He went back to the window before I could get a thank-you out.
I wrapped the hot dog.
I tipped his fries into the sack on top of it and folded the top over twice.
The boy took the sack in both arms and held it tight against his sweatshirt.
The way you hold a thing you can’t afford to drop.
He shouldered the front door open and went out into the cold.
The hatchback’s door swung open before he was halfway across.
The side door by lane one
A woman got out of the driver’s side.
Early thirties, I’d say. A blue smock from the bakery at the grocery, with a hairnet balled up in one fist.
She met him halfway and took the sack out of his arms.
Then she put her other hand flat on top of his wet head, the same way he’d held it over the nickels.
She didn’t look at the sack. She looked over him, at the front glass.
She didn’t look at me.
She looked at the table under the pinball machine.
The man in the orange coat set his cup down.
He stood up, got his arms into that coat one at a time, and walked the other way. Away from the window. Away from the front door too.
He went out the side door by lane one, the one we prop open with a pin in summer so the smokers don’t track through.
The bar on it clanged behind him.
The woman walked the boy back and put him in the back seat and got in after him. The dome light went off.
The hatchback didn’t start.
His nickels were still on my glass, in the little stacks he’d made the second time through.
It was two dollars and eighty-six cents. The tens had paid for everything.
I was scooping them into my palm when my phone buzzed against the cash drawer.
Brent. The owner.
He hadn’t texted me after nine at night in six years, not unless the walk-in quit.
that hatchback been out there 3 hrs
Then, right behind it:
on the cam. whos in it
I typed back that I didn’t know.
I shut the grill off at 10:52, like I’d said I would.
The hood fan was still winding down when the phone went again.
get it out of my lot before you lock up
The coat barrel
Brent Hollister took Pla-Mor over from his uncle six years ago, three years after I started on the grill.
He’s forty-some. Pla-Mor polo tucked into his jeans. He knows the names of the league bowlers’ kids and what grade they’re in.
Each fall he rolls a blue plastic barrel out next to the shoe rental, under a sign he paid a guy to letter by hand.
PLA-MOR KEEPS OTTUMWA WARM.
People drop coats in it all winter, and the Courier sends somebody out to take his picture with one arm around that barrel like it’s his bowling buddy.
Kids under twelve get their first game free till spring.
And that’s the Brent the league knows.
The Brent I know put a camera over my register two winters ago.
“This isn’t about you, Tina,” he said while the installer was up the ladder. “It’s about the drawer.”
He watches it from his recliner at home. I know because some nights he texts me that I gave a league guy a quarter too much change.
Later he put two more up on the poles in the lot, after somebody siphoned the gas out of a bowler’s truck. He gave me the login for those, so I could check the lot on my phone before I walked out to my car alone at midnight.
I’ll give him that one.
He’s got a rule about tickets too. Each order I write goes on the steel spindle by the register and stays there a full week, till he comes in and runs them against the counter camera.
Each hot dog. Each refill.
I count my drawer at close in his office, at his desk, under the framed Courier picture of him and the barrel.
Beside it is a smaller frame.
A little boy, six or so, on lane eight with the bumpers up. He had both hands under a pink house ball that weighed about half what he did. His hair stuck up in back.
“My boy,” Brent said, the one time I asked. “He’s with his mother. She makes it real hard.”
He said it the way you’d say the bank took your truck. Guys on the league bought him a lot of beers off that sentence.
I never asked again. I couldn’t have told you the boy’s name.
That night I didn’t count the drawer right off.
I dumped the pens out of the coffee cup by the register and poured the nickels in. I wrote DUSTIN down the side of it in grease pencil and set it on the shelf under the counter.
I’d rung his hot dog off one of the tens. The change and the other ten, seventeen-fifty, went under the drawer tray with a slip around it that said FRIES GUY.
Then I wrote out Dustin’s ticket and pushed it down on the spindle with everybody else’s.
Plain dog. Foil. Paid.
It was 11:24 when the phone buzzed on the glass.
lock up time tina
I took my coat off the hook and went out the front.
The pole light
The lot was empty except for my car, the hatchback, and a pickup down at the dark end by the dumpster.
The pickup was running. No lights on. Exhaust came out the back of it white and kept coming.
I figured it for somebody sleeping one off. We get those on league nights.
I knocked on the hatchback’s window with one knuckle.
Up close the fog on the inside of the glass had little runs in it where it had dripped.
It took a while. Then the window came down about two inches.
A laundry basket of folded clothes rode in the passenger seat. A pillow was jammed against the back window.
The boy was in the back eating the fries one at a time, slow, like they had to last.
The foil was open in her lap. She’d cut the hot dog in half with something, and both halves were still there.
“I lock the doors at eleven-thirty,” I said. “The entry stays warm till I leave. You could sit in there while I count.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I have to be at work at five anyhow.”
That wasn’t an answer, so I tried another one.
“He left his money on my counter.”
“Hold onto it for him.”
In the back, the boy quit chewing.
She was looking up past my head, at the pole. At the little gray box bolted under the light.
Then down the lot at the pickup idling in the dark.
Her mouth went flat.
“He can see you out here,” she said.
“Who can?”
The window went up.
I stood there with my hands in my coat pockets. The boy leaned over and rubbed a circle in the fog on his window with the side of his fist, and for a second I had his whole face.
Then his mother said something and he lay down out of sight.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
get back inside
I was most of the way to the door when it buzzed again.
don’t feed them
The pinball table
The hatchback was back the next night by a quarter to eight, under the same light, in the same spot, nose out.
The man in the orange coat came in at nine by the side door, ordered a basket of fries and a coffee, paid with a ten, and took the table under the pinball machine.
He didn’t eat the fries that night either.
I didn’t give him his seventeen-fifty. I couldn’t tell you why.
I put a hot dog on at ten-thirty that nobody had ordered.
I paid for it out of my own wallet, a five, and rang it so the spindle would match the camera. Then I wrapped it in foil and walked it out.
This time her window was down before I got there.
She looked at the foil. Then down the lot at the pickup, running in the dark again.
“Tell my dad we don’t need it,” she said.
“This one’s from me.”
She already had it in reverse.
The hatchback backed out from under the light, swung around, and went out onto the road without a blinker. The boy was a hood and a smudge of face in the back window.
I stood in the empty space holding a hot dog.
My phone went in my pocket.
good
When I came back in, the man was standing at the front glass where he could see the road.
“She turn left or right?” he said.
“Left. Toward the highway.”
He nodded like he’d guessed it and sat back down.
I set the foil on his table. I didn’t know what else to do with it.
“She said tell her dad she doesn’t need it,” I said.
“She would.”
He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table.
His name was Gene. Thirty-one years on Wapello County secondary roads, plowing and patching. His daughter was Amber. She did the donuts at the grocery at five in the morning.
“Landlord sold their duplex out from under them,” he said. “Twelve days ago. She slept in the grocery lot till the night manager ran her off. Then the church lot on Elm. I go where the car goes.”
“Ever go out there?”
“Did. Second night. She saw me coming and drove off with the boy’s door not shut all the way.”
“And now you buy fries.”
“And now I buy fries.”
He looked over toward the shoe rental, at the barrel and its hand-lettered sign, and then back at his cup.
“Last night was the first time anything of mine got in that car,” he said. “The boy walked in on his own. I’d been sitting here an hour trying to work out how.”
“And the boy’s dad?”
Gene picked up a cold fry, looked at it, and put it back.
“Doing fine,” he said. “Doing just fine for himself.”
I asked him why she wouldn’t take a thing from him.
He took his time.
“Week before her wedding I told her that fellow was no good,” he said. “And I told her when it went bad, don’t come crying to me.”
He drank the cold coffee.
“Going on ten years,” he said. “And she hasn’t come crying once.”
The spindle
Brent came in at twenty after eleven.
He doesn’t come in at night. He came in the front in a barn coat over his Pla-Mor polo, and he stopped at the shoe rental and squared the sign on the coat barrel with two fingers, the way you’d fix a picture on a wall.
“Courier’s coming out next week,” he said.
The hatchback was gone. Gene was gone too, about ten minutes behind it.
Brent went in the office and lifted the spindle off its base.
“Week’s up,” he said.
I counted my drawer at the end of his desk while he ran tickets. He had his phone propped on the stapler with the counter camera playing at double speed, little people jerking up to my glass and away.
Refill. Nachos. A pitcher for lane twelve. Refill.
He stopped.
His thumb was on Dustin’s ticket. My handwriting, with a grease spot through the corner.
Plain dog. Foil. Paid.
The video had a little gray hood coming up to the counter at double speed, standing there with its fists shut.
Brent slid the ticket up off the spike. He folded it once, then again, and put it in his shirt pocket behind his reading glasses.
“I’ve got that one in my count,” I said.
“Comp it.”
“It was paid.”
“Then you’re over two-fifty. Buy yourself a coffee.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking over my head at the wall.
I turned around.
The little frame. The boy on lane eight with the bumpers up and the pink ball, his hair sticking up in back, the way it does on a boy when nobody’s around to wet it down for him.
I turned back. Brent had gone on to the next ticket.
It was mine. The hot dog I’d bought with my own five.
He held it up between two fingers.
“And this one.”
“I paid for that.”
“I watched you pay for it,” he said. “Then I watched you walk it out to that car.”
He stood up and put the rest of the tickets in his coat pocket.
“That car’s in my lot at close one more night, you call the sheriff’s office,” he said. “I’ll get somebody on that grill who will.”
He went out the front. The door wheezed shut on its closer.
I sat at his desk with my drawer half counted, and the boy on the wall kept grinning with his two front teeth gone.
I locked up at ten to twelve and went out to my car.
The hatchback was pulling in under the pole light, slow, with its headlights off.
Eleven-fourteen
The next night the text came at 10:41.
its back. call it in
Gene was at the pinball table with his fries and his coffee. His pickup was out front tonight, in the spot by the door, running.
I didn’t shut the grill off at 10:52.
I laid three patties on it. Gene watched me do it and didn’t say anything.
Then I put my coat on and walked out to the hatchback.
I got two inches of window.
“I know,” Amber said. “I’m starting it.”
“Grill’s on,” I said. “Burgers. I shut the heat off at eleven-thirty. Come eat.”
She looked up at the pole.
“He’s watching you do this.”
“I know.”
“Is my dad in there?”
“He’s in there.”
She didn’t get to answer. The back door opened and the boy climbed out in the gray sweatshirt with the cuffs rolled three times and walked straight across the lot to our front door by himself.
“Dustin,” she said, once.
He kept going.
She shut the engine off and followed him in.
He was already up on a stool at my counter. She stopped by the shoe rental, next to the barrel, and stood there in her bakery smock with her car keys in her fist.
Gene had gotten to his feet.
“Don’t,” she said to him.
He sat back down.
I put the burgers on the good plates, the ones we save for the league banquet, rang all three off Gene’s seventeen-fifty, and pushed the tickets down on the spindle.
The phone on the glass lit up.
turn that grill off
Then:
now
Amber came and sat two stools down from her boy. She didn’t take off her smock.
Headlights came across the front glass at 11:14.
Brent came in with his barn coat open over a T-shirt. He had on house slippers. He hadn’t stopped to change his shoes.
“Grill goes off at ten fifty-two,” he said. “Has for six years. And I’m sitting in my chair watching you cook with my lights on, my food, after close, for HER.”
He hadn’t looked at the boy yet.
“I told you three nights running, Tina.”
He turned on Amber.
“This what you wanted? Park under my light so every bowler in the league asks me whose car that is?”
“Grocery ran us off,” she said. “The church ran us off.”
“Then go to your father’s. He’s sitting right there.”
Gene ate a fry. It was the first one I’d seen him eat.
“And you,” Brent said. “Sitting at my table three nights with fries you don’t touch, like some goddamn…”
He didn’t finish it.
“Tina. Give me the keys. And the drawer.”
I unclipped my keys off the lanyard and laid them on the glass. The front door, the side door by lane one, the office, the walk-in. I’d carried them nine years.
Then I reached under the register for the coffee cup and set it next to the keys.
DUSTIN, down the side in grease pencil.
“And what’s that?”
I didn’t say.
The boy looked at the cup. He knew his own nickels.
Brent picked it up and tipped it toward the light and looked in. Then he punched no-sale. The drawer came out against his belt.
He poured them into the nickel slot. They didn’t all fit. A few ran over into the dimes.
“Dog’s two-fifty,” he said. “Call it square.”
“He was square,” Gene said. “I paid for that dog.”
Brent looked at the boy for the first time.
“Then the kid’s got thirty-six cents coming,” he said.
He shut the drawer.
Dustin watched it shut. He didn’t say anything. He picked up his burger in both hands and took a bite, and chewed, and put it down.
Amber stood up.
She held her hand out, and he got off the stool and took it. She walked him down the counter to the pinball table and stood in front of her father.
“I’m not crying,” she said.
Gene looked at her a long time.
“I can see that.”
“Is the heat on in your truck?”
“Hasn’t been off in twelve days.”
He got his arms into the orange coat, one and then the other, and picked up the boy’s plate with the rest of the burger on it and carried it out the front door. Dustin went after the plate. Amber went after Dustin.
She stopped at the door and looked back at me.
Then she went out. The hatchback’s lights came on, and it followed the pickup out of the lot with the boy’s face in the pickup’s back window.
“Walk out that door, you’re done,” Brent said. “Hear me? Done.”
I took my coat off the hook.
He was still picking nickels out of the dimes when the door shut behind me.
The truck stop on 34
I work days now, the lunch counter at the truck stop out on Highway 34.
My name tag’s red. The Pla-Mor one is in my kitchen junk drawer with the twist ties and a church key.
The tips are worse. I’m home before dark. I don’t carry a single key to anything there.
A guy from the late league came in for pie a while back and said Brent’s got a kid on the grill now who burns the fries. He said the Courier came out for the barrel picture like always, and it was just the barrel this year.
I didn’t ask him about it.
A boy walked up to my counter at twenty to eleven in the morning with both fists shut. It was a no-school day.
He had on a coat that fit him. The sleeves stopped at his wrists.
His hair was sticking straight up in back.
Gene was in the booth by the window in the orange coat, lifting his coffee. Amber sat across from him in her smock, done with her shift, eating his fries.
Out in the lot the hatchback was parked nose out. The windows were clear.
Dustin opened his hands over the counter. Quarters this time, and a few nickels.
He counted them once.
“Grill’s on,” I said.
He put one finger on the plain hot dog.
“Foil?” I said.
“A plate,” he said. “I’m eating it here.”
Send this one to somebody who’s ever closed a grill at eleven. They’ll know what foil means.
If you’re in the mood for more tales of lives intertwined with unexpected moments, you might find solace in stories like My Husband Read Me Every Letter That Came to This House for Twelve Years, I Left The Boy Named On Those Doors Lying In The Dirt At Ramadi, or even My Uncle Kept The Same Page Nearly Five Years, With Dad’s Line Blank.
