My grandson always tells me I drive too slow, but at eighty-three years old, I figure I have earned the right to check my mirrors twice before putting my Buick into drive. The morning sun was hanging low over the dairy co-op silos down the road, throwing long gray shadows across the pavement of the McDonald’s parking lot on Elm Street. My left knee had been acting up since the damp fog rolled in off the river Tuesday night, making the clutch feel heavier than usual.
I had just wanted a plain sausage biscuit and a small black coffee to keep my hands warm while I drove out to the cemetery to check on Arthur’s headstone.
The drive-through lane was one of those narrow concrete chutes where you feel like a cow heading into a squeeze gate. I had my foot on the brake, watching the digital menu board flicker with pictures of hash browns, when the blue sedan behind me gave a sharp, angry blast of sound. The horn was loud enough to rattle my rearview mirror. I looked up and saw a young woman with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail leaning over her steering wheel, her mouth moving in words I could not hear over the idle of my engine. She threw her hands up against her windshield, fingers splayed wide in total exasperation, just because I had not pulled forward the exact microsecond the car in front of me cleared the speaker box.
My chest tightened up the way it always did when someone started pushing me. I could have just ignored her and ordered my breakfast, but something in me snapped. Arthur used to say I had a stubborn streak a mile wide that would outlive us both. Instead of pulling up, I took my sweet time reading every single item on the illuminated board, from the hot cakes down to the bottled water. When I finally crept my Buick forward to the ordering speaker, I ordered my biscuit and coffee, and then I told the young man at the microphone to add whatever the person behind me was buying.
“You want to pay for the car behind you, ma’am?” the boy asked over the headset, sounding half asleep.
“Put it on my card,” I told him, gripping my worn leather purse a little tighter on the passenger seat. “Every bit of it.
And make sure you tell her who bought it when she gets to the window.”
I drove my old Buick slowly around the curve of the building, the tires crunching softly on the fine gravel near the pickup window. The girl in the blue sedan was right behind me, her bumper nearly touching mine, her face still pinched into a tight knot of irritation. She had her window rolled halfway down by the time I stopped my car to collect my coffee. The teenage girl working the window looked at me, then looked back at the blue sedan, a strange little smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
“Your total is four dollars and twelve cents,” the cashier said, handing me my small coffee cup and the little paper bag with my biscuit. “And your friend back there… well, her order came out to about fourteen dollars because she got those large breakfast meals with the extra hash browns.”
“That’s fine,” I said, handing over my credit card. “Tell her I wanted to help out with her morning.”
The teenager took my card, ran it through the machine, and handed it back along with my receipt.
I watched in my side mirror as the cashier leaned out the window to speak to the girl in the blue sedan. I could not hear the exact words, but I saw the young woman’s expression shift from anger to absolute confusion, and then to something that looked suspiciously like humiliation. Her cheeks flushed a dark red under the morning sun.
When I pulled my Buick forward just another five feet to adjust my travel mug in the cup holder, the girl in the blue sedan leaned out of her own window and waved at me. She even managed a tight, stiff little smile through the glass. She mouthed the words “Thank you” across the three feet of space between our doors, looking thoroughly embarrassed that her public display of impatience had just been repaid with a breakfast she had not earned. She probably thought that was the end of it, that her bad manners had been gracefully erased by an old lady’s unexpected kindness.
She did not know me very well.
I looked down at the passenger seat where the cashier had handed me my small bag, and then I looked at the second bag sitting right beside it, the one containing the fourteen dollars’ worth of sausage biscuits and hash browns that I had just paid for with my own Visa card. The receipt was still tucked neatly under the plastic lid of the hot coffee in my cup holder, but the receipt for her food was fluttering slightly in the breeze coming through my open vent. I put my car into park right there at the second window, leaving plenty of room for nobody to get past me, and I turned off the ignition.
The cashier poked her head back out the window, her eyes wide. “Ma’am? Is everything okay with your coffee?”
“Everything is just fine,” I told her, opening my door and pushing my old joints out onto the pavement. “I just realized I made a bit of a mistake.”
“You need help with something?” the girl asked, leaning over the metal sill.
“No, dear,” I said, walking slowly around the back of my Buick toward the blue sedan idling behind me. “I just realized I paid for her food, but she never actually gave me the receipt for it.”
The driver in the blue sedan rolled her window all the way down, her expression souring back into that same impatient glare she had worn at the menu board. “What is your problem now?” she snapped, her voice sharp enough to cut glass. “I already said thank you. Just move your car.”
“You did say thank you,” I agreed, stopping right beside her driver-side door and looking down at her through my wire-rimmed glasses. “And I appreciate that. But the rule at this establishment is that you need to present your valid receipt at the pickup window to claim your merchandise.”
“I don’t have a paper receipt,” she said, her voice rising an octave. “The girl inside just handed me the bag.”
“Well, that’s just the thing,” I said, reaching into the pocket of my cardigan and pulling out the extra bag of food and the register receipt I had collected just two minutes prior. “You see, since I paid for this order with my own card, technically this food belongs to the cardholder until it crosses the threshold of your vehicle with proper documentation.”
“Are you insane?” she shouted, several people in the drive-through lane behind her starting to inch forward. “Give me my breakfast! I’m already late for my shift at the clinic!”
“Oh, I know you are,” I said, smiling pleasantly as I tucked the bag of warm hash browns firmly under my arm. “And that’s why I’m taking this food right back inside to the manager. You can just turn your car around, go all the way back to the end of the queue, place your order fresh, and wait your turn like everybody else.”
“You can’t do that!” she yelled, her face turning the color of a ripe plum. “Give me those breakfast sandwiches right now!”
“Don’t blow your horn at old people,” I told her quietly, leaning down just enough so she could hear every single word over the sound of her own engine. “We have been around a long time, and we tend to remember things.”
I turned my back on her before she could find another insult, carrying her fourteen dollars’ worth of hot food straight back toward the glass doors of the restaurant. The cashier was standing there with her hand over her mouth, trying very hard not to laugh out loud while watching the whole circus unfold through the tinted glass. I handed the bag right back to her across the counter, along with the receipt.
“Put these back in the warmer for someone with some manners,” I told the girl. “And tell that young lady in the blue sedan that the queue starts all the way back by the marquee sign near the highway.”
I walked back out to my Buick, my knee giving a dull throb that felt almost good after all that walking, and climbed back behind the steering wheel. I checked my rearview mirror just as the blue sedan threw its transmission into reverse with a sharp, ugly clunk, tires spinning backward over the loose gravel of the drive-through lane. She had to back all the way out past the menu board and loop around the entire building to find the tail end of the morning rush hour. I put my car into drive, pulled out onto Elm Street at twenty miles an hour, and finally went to get my own breakfast in peace.
