Page 34 of Smoke and Roses
Gary’s receipts are handwritten carbon copies, thin and yellow, rubber-banded by week. Lindsey and I sit on two upside-down buckets and go through them one by one while Gary rings up customers out front and comes back between them to read over our shoulders.
Gary has a system and he explains it to us twice.
“What’s in that one?” Lindsey points to a box on the top shelf. It says DO NOT OPEN in black marker, underlined three times.
“Mice,” Gary says.
“Mice receipts?”
“No, hon. Mice.” He goes out front to sell somebody a bag of ice melt.
Lindsey looks at me. I move my bucket six inches farther away from the box.
“Ranger,” she whispers. “Are you scared of a damn box?”
“I’m respecting it,” I say, making myself not shudder. Fucking hate mice.
She laughs into her stack of carbon paper, and I go back to mine.
They’re hard to read. Gary writes bad. His letters are small and slanted, and time has faded most of it to a blue barely darker than the paper.
By the second week of April I’m holding every slip about four inches from my nose.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Lindsey says. “You need reading glasses.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re squinting like Gary.”
“It’s bad handwriting.”
“It’s bad eyes. You’re thirty-six. It happens.” She’s grinning at me over her slips. “It’s okay. I still like you.”
Gary comes back in and reads the situation in about half a second. He goes to the spinning rack by his register and comes back with a pair of drugstore readers, tortoiseshell, with the price tag still hanging off one arm.
“On the house,” he says.
“I don’t need them.”
“Son, nobody needs them till they put them on.”
I put them on. Every line on the slip in my hand jumps into focus, every number, clear as day.
“Damn it,” I say.
Lindsey has her phone up and takes a picture before I can get them off. Then she takes two more.
“Who are you sending that to?”
“Nobody.” Her phone whooshes. “Cassia.”
It whooshes again. “And Rob.”
Thirty seconds later my phone vibrates and it’s Rob.
Holy shit, Sarge. Welcome to forty.
I’m 36.
