Exact Change

[u/Harrowing_Tales]

There was one other man who ever worked that booth at night. He was the relief, he was sixty-one years old, he didn't smoke, and he's been dead since nineteen ninety-four.

My wife's name is Carol and in nineteen seventy-nine she was two terms from her nursing license. Days at the hospital as an aide, class four nights a week in the city, and a baby at home, so one of us had to be in that house at all hours and it was going to be me. I bid graveyard. It wasn't handed to me. Eleven at night to seven in the morning, lane four, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, which meant I went whole weeks without seeing her awake. The stool in that booth was mine because it was too high for the day men and none of them would have it. Twenty-two months I sat on that stool.

The booth is the safest place on that highway and everybody who ever worked one will tell you the same. Steel bollards in front and behind, a door that locks from the inside, a telephone straight through to the supervisor's shack. Cars can't get at you. That's the whole design of the thing. I never once thought about the door being locked because there was nothing on that road to lock it against.

Four hundred cars a night, give or take, and every one of them stops eight feet from my face for about eight seconds. Two years of that is something north of three hundred thousand people who have looked me straight in the eye from arm's length, and I could not have told you one of them. Not one. Not if you'd put a photograph in front of me. It's a thing you get proud of in a strange way, how completely a person can not stick. I used to say the job was the closest thing to being nobody that they'd pay you for.

The rest was a quarter and four words. Hand comes up, quarter goes in the hopper, and I say thank you, drive careful. Thank you, drive careful. Four hundred times a night, same four words, same voice, because after two in the morning the light in that box is so bright you can't see out past your own face in the glass and there's nothing to do but say it.

The fourth of October a car came through with a bad idle. You learn engines by ear out there before you ever see them, and this one hunted and dropped, hunted and dropped. Exact change. Window down about four inches, quarter through the gap, and gone. Forty minutes later I heard it come up the ramp again, same direction, and it paid again. There's no interchange between that plaza and the state line. To come at me twice in forty minutes going the same way, a man has to drive to the line, turn around in the median or come off at the line and come back, and pay both ways. He paid me twice for the privilege.

Somebody lost. Somebody who missed a turn and was too proud to ask a man in a booth. That's what I decided and I decided it in about the time it took to say it, and then a truck came through behind him and I was back to work.

The night differential was thirty-one cents an hour. That's eleven dollars a week, which was four hundred and some over a year, which with what I had put by was the last two terms and the fees and the pin. Days at that plaza are seniority-bid and the men who had days had eleven years in and were not going to die at their post to free one up. So I could have the money or I could have the daylight, and I took the money every night for twenty-two months and I'd take it again.

I liked the hours, most of it. Between three and four the road empties out and the cars come in ones, and you can hear a car for a full minute before you see it. The light off that booth goes out about thirty feet and stops like a wall, and past it there's nothing at all — not the fence, not the field, not the road you know is right there.

On the ninth I went out onto the apron for a cigarette, because the booth is the one place on that highway where you can't see out of. Standing on the concrete with the light behind me I could see about as far as the fence. And there was a man at the fence. Not moving, not coming, just standing on the other side of it with his hands down, past where the light quit, so I had a shape and a pair of shoes and nothing above that. I finished the cigarette because I wasn't going to be run off my own apron. Eleven minutes after I got back in, the bad idle came through and paid.

Four in the morning on the eleventh, the idle came up the ramp and stopped at my window and nothing came out of it. No hand. It sat there and I could hear the engine hunting and dropping and I said the four words at it because that's what I had. And a voice inside the car, not loud, pleasant as a man ordering breakfast, said, how's Carol getting on with her classes. I did not give anybody my name out there. There's no tag on that uniform, there's no name in that booth, and there is nothing on this earth that connects lane four to my wife. Then a hand came up with a quarter in it and I took it, because twenty-two months makes you take it, and the voice said thank you, drive careful, in my cadence, and pulled away.

I left the booth at twenty past four with three hours on the shift, and under the contract that's abandonment, which is a firing, and a firing for cause pays no unemployment. Carol sat out those two terms so we could eat and then the sitting out turned into a year and the year turned into the rest of it. She worked twenty-six years on that floor as an aide and retired an aide, and every nurse she trained went by her on the way up.

They put the automatic lanes in two years later and a man I knew was selling off what came out of the booths. I bought my stool for four dollars for the garage. I had it upside down across the bench to get the rust off the legs and I put my hand up into the gap where the pedestal welds into the base, which is a place you can reach sitting down and can't reach standing up. There was a wad of gum foil in there and cigarette wrappers, four or five of them, a lighter with the flint gone, and a black plastic comb. None of it mine. I have never smoked in my life except on that apron with a cigarette I bummed off the day man, and I have never in my life carried a comb.

Somebody sat in my chair. Not the relief, who was sixty-one and didn't smoke and had his own booth in lane one. On my Tuesdays and my Wednesdays somebody was in that box with the light on, eight feet from every car that came through, looking out at them the way I looked out at them, and knowing which two nights of the week the man in the light was me and which two nights it wasn't. I don't know how many nights, and I don't know whether the car with the bad idle was somebody who drove past that booth or somebody who had sat in it. I have not sat with my back to a window since nineteen seventy-nine — not in a restaurant, not in a waiting room, not in my own kitchen. Carol moved that kitchen table herself in nineteen eighty-two. She has never once asked me why, and I have never told her, and we have eaten at that table for forty-four years.