Chapter 4 - THE OLD TANK
Dorothy pulled out a yellow chair.
“Sit.”
Eli sat.
Daniel Mercer quietly moved toward the far end of the store.
Michael stayed.
Dorothy held the attendance notice.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Eli shrugged.
“Mom has enough stuff.”
“I’m not your mother.”
“That’s why.”
The answer hurt Dorothy more than he intended.
Michael understood it immediately.
Eli did not want to become one more thing Dorothy had to fix.
“Why did you stop going?” Michael asked.
Dorothy looked at him.
He ignored her warning expression.
Eli rubbed his palms on his jeans.
“Kids found out about the motel.”
Dorothy’s face tightened.
“They bothered you?”
“Sometimes.”
“How?”
Eli shrugged again.
Michael remembered being sixteen and discovering that the easiest way to survive embarrassment was to make every answer smaller than the truth.
“You don’t have to tell us,” Michael said.
Eli looked at him gratefully.
Then he said, “One kid asked if the motel had hourly rates.”
Dorothy closed her eyes.
Eli continued.
“I hit him.”
“Eli.”
“Not hard.”
Michael almost smiled.
Dorothy did not.
“What happened?”
“Three days suspension.”
“And afterward?”
“I just didn’t go back.”
His mother worked nights.
They changed rooms twice because the motel kept raising weekly rates.
The school bus did not serve the highway motel, so Eli took the county bus each morning.
At first he had transferred downtown and walked twelve blocks to school.
Then he began getting off at the library instead.
Nobody noticed.
Marissa slept during the day.
Dorothy assumed the bus took him to school.
Eli had learned how easy it was for a quiet child to disappear between adults who were all working too hard.
Marissa arrived forty minutes later.
Dorothy had called the nursing home reception desk and asked them to send her over after her shift.
Marissa Carter entered wearing navy scrubs and exhaustion.
She listened.
Then looked at her son.
“Eighteen days?”
Eli stared at the table.
Marissa sat beside him.
“I thought you liked school.”
“I do.”
“Then why?”
“I didn’t want you to have another thing.”
Marissa covered her mouth.
Michael looked away.
He knew that sentence too.
Children in struggling families learned arithmetic adults never taught them.
How much worry could Mom carry?
How much food was left?
How many dollars before Friday?
How many problems before you became one yourself?
Marissa put both hands around Eli’s face.
“You are not a thing I have to carry.”
Eli started crying.
Not loudly.
That made Dorothy cry too.
The next morning, Dorothy drove them to school.
Michael followed in a rental sedan because Dorothy refused to let his supercar “make a federal event out of eighth-grade attendance.”
The school counselor was a calm woman named Karen Wells.
She did not shame Eli.
She did not shame Marissa.
She asked what had happened.
She listened.
Transportation could be arranged.
The suspension issue was finished.
A teacher had already been saving his assignments.
Eli could return Monday.
When they left, he held a folder against his chest.
“What’s that?” Dorothy asked.
“Science stuff.”
“You behind?”
“A little.”
“How little?”
“Kind of a lot.”
Michael looked at him.
“You good at science?”
Eli shrugged.
“He’s very good,” Karen said from the doorway.
Eli looked embarrassed.
Dorothy smiled.
“Good. You can explain why my refrigerator sounds like a tractor.”
On the ride back, Eli drew on the inside cover of his folder.
Michael glanced over.
It was a rough map.
The motel.
The station.
The bus stop.
School.
Four places connected by black lines.
Eli drew a star over Hale’s Service Station.
“Why the star?”
Eli looked at him as if it were obvious.
“That’s where I know people.”
Michael said nothing.
At the station, the environmental inspection had already begun.
Daniel stood near Pump Four with two technicians pushing a ground scanner across the cracked pavement.
Dorothy climbed out.
“Find your ghost tank?”
Daniel pointed behind the old repair bay.
“Maybe.”
The scanner had identified a large metal object underground.
Not beneath the active pumps.
Farther back.
Near a patch of weeds where an old air pump had once stood.
Dorothy frowned.
“That can’t be right.”
A technician marked the pavement.
“Approximately eight feet long.”
Daniel looked at her.
“Does that location mean anything?”
Dorothy shook her head.
“Frank said they dug the tank up after the state changed the rules.”
“When?”
“Ninety-seven. Maybe ninety-eight.”
Michael watched her.
“You saw them remove it?”
Dorothy hesitated.
“No.”
That mattered.
“Frank handled the pumps. I handled the store.”
The technician drilled a narrow test hole beside the marked area.
Dorothy stood rigidly.
Michael moved beside her.
“You okay?”
“No.”
Fair answer.
They watched the technician lower a probe.
A minute passed.
Then two.
He pulled it back.
His expression changed.
Daniel noticed.
“What?”
The technician smelled the probe.
Then looked at his meter.
“There’s petroleum product down there.”
Dorothy went pale.
“Leaking?”
“Not necessarily.”
Daniel stepped closer.
“How much product?”
“Can’t tell without opening it.”
Dorothy stared at the cracked concrete.
The station had survived recessions.
Snowstorms.
Frank’s death.
The new interstate exit.
Thirty-two years of changing traffic.
Now something her husband had promised was gone was sitting beneath her feet.
Michael looked toward Pump Four.
One hidden tank could make every argument about keeping the station meaningless.
Daniel’s voice was careful.
“If that tank leaked, Dorothy, the cleanup could cost more than the entire property.”
Nobody spoke.
Then Tommy Keane, who had been repairing the electrical panel, walked outside.
He saw where the technicians had marked the pavement.
And stopped.
“No,” he said.
Everyone looked at him.
Tommy stared at the rectangle painted on the ground.
“I remember that spot.”
Dorothy turned.
“You do?”
Tommy nodded slowly.
Then he looked at Michael.
“Frank didn’t remove that tank.”
Dorothy’s face hardened.
“What are you saying?”
Tommy pointed toward the ground.
“He converted it.”
“To what?”
Tommy’s eyes returned to the old green thermos sitting inside the window.
Then back to Dorothy.
May you like
“Your husband was keeping something down there.”
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