The sticker was still there, taped to the passenger-side glass, the price crossed out in red marker by someone at the lot who had better handwriting than me. I hadn't peeled it yet. The engine made no sound I could identify, just a faint hum that could have been the refrigerator inside, or nothing. The Hendersons' sprinkler kicked on across the street and it was suddenly the loudest thing in the neighborhood. I sat there with my travel mug going cold in the cupholder - thinking: forty-one miles per gallon, thinking: finally.
The Number on the Sticker Argued Back
The manager's name was Brendt, spelled out on the voicemail greeting like he'd had to do it before. He put me on hold twice, and I listened to a saxophone version of something I couldn't place, and I wrote *Brendt* on the notepad next to the phone just to have something to do with the pen. Two flags - he said. I heard him scrolling, the little mouse-click rhythm of it, and he read the dates the way someone reads a grocery list, and then he said *cleared* both times, and I pressed the pen down hard enough that it tore a small hole in the notepad next to his name. He asked if there was anything else he could help me with - and I looked at the hole in the paper and said no, and the saxophone was still going when I hung up.
The printout came out of the thermal printer still warm, and the guy - Pat, his shirt said, above a small American flag - smoothed it flat on the counter with the heel of his hand like he was ironing something. Three cells - he said, and pointed with a pencil to a column of numbers I couldn't read without squinting, and I squinted, and they still meant nothing except that three of them were smaller than the rest. Twenty-four hundred, he said. I had the original purchase agreement in my jacket pocket - folded into quarters, the number I'd circled in the parking lot of the dealership still showing through from the back in blue ink, and I didn't take it out. Pat capped the pencil and set it on top of the printout and said he could get the pack by Thursday, and the fluorescent light above the counter hummed the same faint note the car had made that first morning in the driveway, which I now understood wasn't the refrigerator and wasn't nothing.
What the Printout Said
The printout lives under the registration now - creased into eighths, Pat's pencil mark still visible on the column of small numbers. Forty-seven, this morning. Forty-eight for a block and a half near the school, where the light at Dunmore and Fifth goes yellow and I lifted my foot somewhere around the dry cleaner and let the car do whatever it wanted to do, watched the green bar crawl toward full like a thermometer in July. The Dunmore light has been red every single morning for six months and I haven't once arrived at it still moving. I don't know when I started reading the light instead of the bumper in front of me - sometime after Pat - sometime before I stopped checking the number every thirty seconds - but the commute is twenty-two minutes now instead of nineteen and I haven't minded, which is the part I'd have trouble explaining to anyone, including myself.
My brother called from the parking lot of a Sheetz somewhere outside Youngstown, wanting to know if I'd done the math yet, and I could hear the pump running behind him - the ka-chunk of it. I had a Post-it on the cabinet above the toaster where I'd been writing down fill-up totals since February, fourteen of them now in my own handwriting, and I pulled it down and held it under the kitchen light and said I wasn't sure, which was true, because the column didn't account for Pat - and adding Pat made the column look different than I wanted it to look right then. He said the Sheetz was forty-one cents cheaper than anything near his house, and I said yeah, and he said the Prius his neighbor had was making a sound, and I said what kind of sound, and he said just a sound - and I looked at the Post-it and put it back up crooked, one corner unstuck and curling away from the cabinet like it was trying to leave.
The fill-up log moved to the inside of the junk drawer sometime in March, and I found it this morning under the takeout menus and the dead AAA card, the Post-it gone stiff and barely sticky, the last four numbers written smaller than the rest because I'd been running out of room. I stood at the counter and added them the long way - with a pen, the way my father did taxes, and got a number that was either good or not depending on whether I counted Pat, which I did this time, which made it not - and then I added them again without Pat and wrote the new number down and looked at it for a while. The refrigerator kicked on. The car was in the driveway making whatever it makes - I can hear it now through the window glass, that faint hum, the one I know isn't nothing - and the light at Dunmore and Fifth has been resynchronized, I noticed yesterday, so it's green sometimes when I crest the hill and I keep finding myself wishing it weren't. I folded the Post-it back into the drawer on top of the takeout menus and pushed it shut - and the corner curled loose again in the dark where I couldn't see it but knew it was doing it.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
