All stories › Family Drama › Half a Tank › Episode 1
A Hair Under
Episode 1 of 3 of Half a Tank by Greg Sandoval · free to read
The gas needle sat a hair under half, and Martin had already seen it.
He stood at the driver’s window of Mom’s car in the lot of the furniture store that closed in the spring. Saturday, nine in the morning. The rota said so. Martin calls it the rota because he read the word somewhere and liked it.
“Rule one,” he said.
“It’s half,” Kyle said from behind the wheel.
“It’s a hair under half,” Martin said.
“A hair is half. Ask anybody.”
I had the log open on the hood. The log is a spiral notebook that lives clipped to the visor, and I reconcile it. I am the middle one. Reconciling comes with the position.
“Rule one says half a tank minimum,” Martin said. “Minimum means not under.”
“You wrote rule one,” Kyle said.
“We all wrote rule one.”
We had, technically. The week after the funeral, at Mom’s kitchen table, on a yellow legal pad. None of us would sell her car and none of us could buy the other two out. Seven rules. Martin held the pen. Martin is fifty-two and holds the pen at things.
The pad lives in the glove box of Martin’s own truck, so it cannot be amended in the wild.
Kyle drove across the road to the gas station, put in four dollars and eleven cents, and drove back. He laid the receipt on the hood beside the log.
“Half,” he said.
“Fine,” Martin said. “Keys. Log. Tank.”
He says that every Saturday. It is the whole ceremony. Then he folded himself into the driver’s seat, and the seat stayed where it was, because rule four says the seat stays where Mom had it. Mom was five foot two. Martin is six foot three. He drove out of the lot with his knees on either side of the wheel like a man on a child’s bicycle.
The top button of his coat is sewn on with green thread. Mom owned one spool of thread her whole life, and it was green. Every button in this family is green.
Kyle watched him go. “He’s going to lose a kneecap for that seat.”
“He knows.”
That night I had the log pages up on my phone at my kitchen table. I photograph every page before the handover. Martin says memory is not a record, and there he is right.
Rob leaned over my shoulder with a fork. “You’re auditing your brothers.”
“I’m reconciling,” I said.
“That’s what auditors say.”
Kyle’s week was six entries, all of them “errands,” totaling sixty-one miles. The odometer had moved a hundred and eighty-nine. That was Kyle. Kyle logs the way he texts, in fragments, when he remembers.
Then I looked at Martin’s week, the one before. Martin logs to the tenth. Hardware store, 3.2. Church, 4.1. Home, 4.1. Forty-one point three miles in block capitals, and the odometer had moved a hundred and sixty-nine.
I went back nine weeks. The gap was there on Martin’s weeks and on Kyle’s. Never on mine. On my weeks the car sleeps in my driveway. On Martin’s weeks it sleeps in Mom’s garage, because Martin’s garage holds a boat and his driveway holds his truck, and he wants his week the way you want your name on a thing.
“A hundred and twenty-eight,” I said. “A hundred and twenty-seven point seven. A hundred and twenty-eight point four. Six times.”
“Somebody’s got a route,” Rob said.
Kyle lives at Mom’s. He has lived in the room over her garage for two years. I said it out loud to hear how it sounded. “Kyle drives it on the off weeks.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere. A hundred and twenty-eight miles of nowhere.”
Rob put the fork down. “Not far, then. A lot of near.”
Monday at lunch I let myself into Mom’s garage. I have a key to the house. I still water her plants, and the plants are dead, and I water them.
I got in the passenger side, because rule four covers the driver’s seat and I am not built for it either. Butterscotch in the console. Her sunglasses in the visor above the log clip. And on the dash, a phone mount on a suction cup, angled for a driver five foot four.
Kyle is five foot four.
The trunk had a red insulated bag folded flat under the mat, the kind with a zippered lid that restaurant orders ride in. It smelled of garlic and cardboard. Inside were three order slips with house numbers from our side of town and a tip penciled on each one.
So that was the route. Kyle was driving Mom’s car for a delivery app on his weeks and on Martin’s, four nights of short runs, and logging none of it. Rule six says no driving for pay, because of the insurance. Rule six is the one Martin read aloud twice.
The bag’s strap had torn once and been mended. I turned it over to the stitches.
Mom had sewn the strap in green.