My cousin Devin held a $186,000 lottery slip up over our register and called the old man who mops our floors a thief in front of the whole Saturday line. “Nineteen years we let you push a mop in here, and this is how you thank us,” he said. Not one of us took Morris’s side, me included. Then a customer looked up.
Morris has mopped my uncle’s feed store on the east side of Pueblo every night for nineteen years.
It’s the only place he goes besides the cemetery and the grocery.
If that job went, he had nothing left to get up for.
It started Friday at closing.
Morris stood at the lottery machine by the register with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and fed in one slip, the way he does every Friday before he fills his bucket.
The machine played its little song.
The one it plays for a winner.
My cousin Devin was counting out the cash drawer two feet away.
He stopped counting.
Saturday morning Devin beat his own father to the store.
I came in at 6:40 to open the register, and he was already in the office with Uncle Russell, door shut, talking fast.
When they came out, Devin walked straight down the birdseed aisle to where Morris was finishing the floor, reached into the old man’s shirt pocket, and took the slip out like it was a gas receipt.
“That’s mine, son,” Morris said.
“Yours?” Devin held it high so the line could see. “I bought this Thursday and left it on the counter. You palmed it while you were mopping.”
Morris didn’t grab for it.
He just stood there holding the mop.
Seven people were waiting to pay. The radio over the door was playing that song about a train it seems to play every single hour.
Tiffany, who has been on our second register since spring, said she’d seen him “hanging around the counter a lot lately.”
Jamar from the loading dock said, “He does sweep that corner twice. I always wondered about that.”
Devin stepped closer to Morris.
“Nineteen years we let you push a mop in here, and THIS is how you thank us? You’re a THIEF, Morris.”
Uncle Russell didn’t look at Morris at all.
“Let’s not make it ugly,” he said. “Morris, you’ve been good to us. We’ll forget it.”
Forget it.
Like Morris was the one who needed forgiving.
And me?
I’d worked that register all day Thursday.
I said nothing.
Devin’s my cousin. His dad signs my checks. My daughter starts community college in January and I’m the one paying for it.
“Nellie’s numbers,” Morris said.
He said it so low that nobody but me heard it.
“What?” Devin said.
“Those are Nellie’s numbers.”
Devin laughed in his face. “Nellie’s been gone NINETEEN YEARS, Morris. Let it go.”
That’s when Karla Mishra set her forty-pound bag of sunflower seed down on the counter.
Karla buys the same bag every Saturday at 8:15. She spent twenty-six years as a detective before she retired, and she still stands in a checkout line like she’s watching a parking lot.
“Can I see that?” she said.
Devin handed it over.
He smiled when he did it.
Karla pulled her glasses out of her jacket and read the slip for a long time.
Then she looked up.
Over my register.
There’s a row of five wooden seed drawers hanging above our counter, and they’ve been there longer than I have.
Each one has a number painted on the front by hand, red, with little yellow curls around it.
Six. Fourteen. Nineteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-three.
I’d looked at those drawers ten thousand times.
I never once asked who painted them.
“Russell,” Karla said. “Who did the drawers?”
My uncle cleared his throat. “Morris’s wife. The year we built the counter. Why?”
Karla held the slip up next to the drawers.
She didn’t say a word.
She didn’t need to.
Tiffany put a hand over her mouth.
Jamar walked back toward the loading dock without looking at anybody.
Devin went red from the collar up.
“So what? I stare at those things eight hours a day. Anybody would play them.”
“Sure,” Karla said. “Anybody would. So tell me the bonus ball.”
Devin opened his mouth.
The bonus ball isn’t on the wall.
It isn’t painted anywhere in that store.
His eyes went up to the drawers anyway, all five of them, one after the other, and then back down to the slip in Karla’s hand, which she had turned face down on the counter.
Morris started to speak, and Karla lifted one finger without even turning her head.
“Not you, Morris. I want HIS answer.”
The whole line had gone quiet. Even the radio was between songs.
Devin looked at his father.
Uncle Russell put his hand flat on Devin’s arm.
“Don’t answer that,” he said. Then, to Karla: “I think you should pay for your seed and go.”
Karla didn’t move.
“I’ll pay, Russell. Then I’m asking the lottery office for EVERY TICKET THIS MACHINE PRINTED ON THURSDAY. What time. Which register.”
Which register.
Mine.
My uncle turned around slowly and looked at me.
So did Devin.
So did Morris, mop still in his hands, like he’d already guessed what I was going to say and was ready to forgive me for it.
“Sonya,” my uncle said. Only my name.
And I reached for the drawer under the register, where we keep the week’s tape.
Thursday’s tape
That drawer sticks. You have to lift and pull at the same time, the way Uncle Russell showed me my first week.
The week was in there, five fat curls of paper with a rubber band around each one and the day written on masking tape in my handwriting. MON. TUE. WED. THU. FRI.
I took the band off Thursday and ran it out across the counter, right past Karla’s bag of seed.
Lottery sales print on our tape in their own block, with a little star in front. Thursday had nine stars. Eight were scratchers.
One was a draw game. Five numbers and a bonus ball. Two dollars, cash.
5:52 p.m. Register one. Clerk 04.
I’m clerk 04.
I tore that inch of paper off with my thumbnail and laid it next to the slip, and not one person in that line said a word.
Devin leaned over and read it upside down.
“There,” he said. “5:52. That’s me. I came up front before I counted the drawer, bought one, set it down by the gum and forgot about it.” He turned to me. “You were right there, Sonya. You rang it.”
Karla looked at me too. She didn’t ask me anything. She just waited, the way my ex used to wait for the microwave to finish instead of opening it at one second.
Uncle Russell had his hand on Devin’s arm still.
Morris had his eyes on the floor he’d just mopped.
“Go on,” Devin said. “Tell her who was standing there.”
Nellie’s card
I came to work for Uncle Russell seven years ago, the month my divorce was final, with a twelve-year-old and a car that needed two tires.
He put me on register one and gave me a green apron with my name ironed on, spelled right, which nobody had ever done.
I owe him that. I know I owe him that.
The first Thursday I worked a full day, a thin man in a gray work shirt came in at ten to six with his bucket already on wheels behind him and waited in line like a customer.
He took out a brown wallet and pulled a play card out of it.
You’ve seen those cards. Little rows of numbered boxes, and you fill in the ones you want with a pencil. His was so old it had gone soft as a dollar bill, and the pencil in the boxes had been gone over so many times it shined.
He handed it to me with two one-dollar bills folded the long way.
I fed it through. The machine printed. I gave him the slip and the card, and he put them both in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
“You know there’s quick pick,” I said. I was new. I thought I was helping.
“She filled it out,” he said. “In the hospital. She said I’m not allowed to stop.”
That was Morris. That was the first thing he ever said to me.
Every Thursday after that, ten to six, the card and the two folded bills. Every Friday at closing he checked it at the machine before he filled his bucket. I never once looked at the bottom row of that card. It was his.
Devin came home to Pueblo three years ago after a couple of semesters in Denver that nobody talks about. Uncle Russell had polos made for the two of them, navy, with CISNEROS & SON stitched over the pocket. He told every rancher who came in for mineral blocks that his boy was the future of the store.
Morris empties the office trash every night. He told me once he reads every piece of paper before it goes in the bag. “Habit,” he said, and didn’t say from where.
So I know he saw the bank letter, because I saw it first.
October. It was sitting face up on Uncle Russell’s desk when I went in for change. PAST DUE in red across the top, and a number for the note on the building. $58,400.
I put the roll of quarters in my pocket and walked out like I hadn’t read it.
That’s who I am. I’ve been that person a long time.
Now Devin was waiting on me, and the line was waiting on me, and Morris was standing at the end of the counter with the mop in both hands.
I knew who’d stood at register one at 5:52 on Thursday.
I’d known since 6:40 that morning.
Uncle Russell let go of Devin’s arm and walked to the office and held the door open for me.
The office door
He shut it behind us. The office smelled like the space heater and the coffee he burns on purpose.
Devin’s phone was face down on the desk, and it buzzed twice while we stood there. Uncle Russell turned it over, looked, and turned it back.
“You know what that is?” he said.
I didn’t.
“That’s a man in Colorado Springs. Your cousin owes him forty-one thousand dollars. On games. Football, basketball, I don’t even know what all.” He sat down hard in his chair. “I’ve been paying it down off the store’s line of credit since spring. That’s why the building’s behind. That’s the whole reason.”
The bank letter. The red PAST DUE.
“He told me this morning,” Uncle Russell said. “Six-fifteen, crying in that chair. He said Morris won, and he said what if. And I said no, and then I said what if, too.”
“Then ask Morris,” I said. “Ask him for a loan.”
“Morris is seventy-four years old. What does he need a hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars for? He needs a floor to mop and a place to come at night.” He looked at me. “And he still has one. If everybody’s smart.”
He didn’t say if not. He didn’t have to say it to me.
“Alexandra starts in January,” he said.
My daughter’s name in his mouth made me want to sit down on the floor.
“I’ll pay it. Both years. Books. Whatever she needs.” He rubbed his face. “You’ve been here seven years, mija. You’re family. You don’t have to lie for anybody. You sell two hundred tickets a week. Who remembers one?”
“I remember Karla’s seed.”
“So you’re good with seed. You don’t remember tickets.”
His desk printer was by my elbow. There was one sheet in the tray. A claim form from the lottery website, the top half already typed. The name in the box was Devin’s.
He’d printed it before I got there.
Uncle Russell got up and put his hand on the doorknob.
“You don’t remember,” he said. “Say it once and it’s over.”
Morris’s keys
The line had grown to eleven. A man in a feed cap had his arms crossed on top of a salt block like he was going to sleep on it.
Karla had paid. Exact change, coins counted out on the counter, and she was still standing there with the slip face down under two fingers.
Tiffany had her phone face down on her register. She kept turning it over and turning it back without reading anything.
Jamar was back from the dock, leaning on the end cap of birdseed with his hands in his pockets.
Devin smiled at me when I came out. He knew where I’d been.
I stood at register one and put both hands flat on the counter.
“I sell a lot of tickets, Karla,” I said. “I don’t remember.”
It came out easier than I thought it would. That’s the part I still think about.
Devin breathed out through his nose. Uncle Russell went to the second register and started ringing up the man with the salt block like this was any Saturday.
Karla didn’t look at me. She looked at Devin.
“She doesn’t remember,” Karla said. “Okay. Devin, you were up front at 5:52 on Thursday.”
“I just said that.”
“What were you wearing?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question. Your cousin rang you up. What were you wearing?”
“This,” he said, and pulled at the polo. “I wear this every day.”
“Okay,” Karla said, and said nothing else, and that was worse.
Morris set the mop in the bucket.
He reached into his pants pocket and took out his key ring. The front door key, the dock key, the office key, and a little brass tag with a hole punched in it that I’d seen on that ring for seven years and never asked about.
He put the ring on the counter in front of Uncle Russell.
“I’ll finish the floor tonight if you want it finished,” he said. “Then that’s all.”
“Morris,” Uncle Russell said. “Nobody’s asking you to go.”
“Let him go, Dad,” Devin said.
Morris didn’t look at any of us. He took his bucket by the handle and wheeled it down the birdseed aisle, the wheel that squeaks squeaking the whole way, past the feed sacks, to the back.
The dock door banged shut behind him.
The loading dock
Tiffany said, “You can’t just leave the line,” and I left the line.
The dock is cold in the mornings, even with the sun on it. Morris’s car was parked where it always is, a tan Buick with one hubcap, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat sideways with the door open and his feet on the gravel.
The bucket was still on the dock where he’d left it.
He didn’t look surprised to see me. He looked like a man waiting for a bus he knew was late.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Your girl,” he said. “January. You told me.”
I had told him. Over the summer, at closing, when he asked why I was working Sundays now.
“Don’t lose that job over me, Sonya.”
He took the brown wallet out of his back pocket and opened it and slid the play card out and held it on his knee so I could see.
Six. Fourteen. Nineteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-three. The pencil shined in every box.
And in the bottom row, the one I’d never looked at, one more box filled in.
Eight.
“Her birthday,” he said. “August eighth. She said the drawers were for the store and the eight was for her.”
On the back of the card, in pencil that had gone gray, small and slanted, somebody had written Mo — one a week. Don’t you dare quit. And a letter N.
I stood there holding the card in both hands. It was soft. It was warm from being in his wallet.
“There’s something else,” Morris said.
He unbuttoned the flap of his shirt pocket, the one Devin had reached into, and took out a sheet of paper folded in four. It was one of our feed invoices, the yellow copy. On the back he’d written in pencil, in big careful letters, the way somebody writes who learned English as a grown man.
Russell. For the building. $58,400. Nellie would want the store to stay. Morris.
The same number. Down to the hundred.
“I wrote it last night,” he said. “At his desk, after the floor. I was going to put it in his hand this morning when he came in.”
He looked at the dock door.
“Then he came out of that office with his son.”
I said, “You were going to pay off his building.”
“Nellie painted those drawers,” Morris said. “Where else would I go at night?”
He held his hand out for the card. I didn’t give it to him.
“Can I borrow these?” I said. “Both of them. Ten minutes.”
Morris looked at me a long time.
“Bring her card back,” he said.
Register one
When I walked back in, Devin was behind the counter at my register, ringing up the man in the feed cap with my login still up on the screen.
I took the card and the invoice and laid them on the counter next to the inch of tape and Karla’s two fingers on the slip.
“Morris,” I said. “5:52. I rang it. He paid with two dollars folded long ways.”
That’s all I said. It’s maybe the most I’ve said in that store in seven years.
Karla turned the slip over.
The bonus ball was printed at the bottom by itself, in a little box. 08.
She put her finger on the card, on the filled-in eight, and didn’t say anything.
Devin talked.
“Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING me, Sonya? You just said you didn’t remember. Two minutes ago. Everybody heard her.” He turned to the line. “Everybody heard her say it. Now she goes out back with him and comes in with a card? He could have filled that out last night. That card could be anybody’s. She’s always taken his side, Dad. Always. She brings him tamales at Christmas. What is that?”
“What’s the bonus ball, Devin?” Karla said.
“I don’t have to answer you. You’re not a cop anymore, lady, you’re a lady who buys birdseed.”
“Sunflower,” Karla said.
“Eleven,” Devin said. “It’s eleven. I play eleven.”
Nobody in the line moved.
Uncle Russell had picked up the invoice. He was reading the back of it. He read it once and then he turned it over to the front, where it said forty bags of layer pellets, like the front might explain the back, and then he turned it over again.
He didn’t say anything. He sat down on a stack of horse feed.
“Dad,” Devin said. “Dad, she’s doing this because she wants your job someday, okay? Think about it.”
Tiffany slid her phone across the counter. Not to Devin. To Karla.
“He texted me Friday night,” Tiffany said. Her voice was shaking. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Morris isn’t even here. He said if anybody asks tomorrow, say you saw Morris hanging around the counter. He said he’d take care of me.”
Karla read it and held it up so Uncle Russell could see. Friday, 9:47 p.m.
“He sent me the same one,” Jamar said, from the end cap. He didn’t take his phone out. “I didn’t say it the way he wanted. I just said the corner thing.”
Friday night. 9:47.
Before the office. Before six-fifteen, crying in a chair. Before the what if.
Uncle Russell looked up at his son from the feed sacks.
“You told me you woke up and thought of it,” he said.
“Dad, the guy in Springs said end of the month. End of the MONTH, Dad. You think I wanted to do this? You think I wanted to do it to Morris? He’s seventy-four. He wasn’t gonna spend it. He was gonna die with it in a coffee can.”
Somebody in the line said, “Jesus.”
Devin pulled off the polo halfway, like he was going to walk out, and stopped, and pulled it back down, and went into the office and shut the door.
Karla picked up the slip and the tape and handed them both to me, not to Russell.
“Monday, the claim center opens at eight,” she said. “I can drive him. If he wants a ride.”
Uncle Russell was still holding the invoice.
“Sonya,” he said. Then nothing. Then, “Get your things.”
I untied my apron and hung it on the hook by the dock door and went out to give Morris his card back.
Northern Avenue
In January I work the register at a gas station on Northern Avenue. Same kind of lottery machine. It plays the same song for a winner. I’ve heard it twice.
Alexandra’s first semester went on the credit card I’d paid off in October.
Karla drove Morris to the claim center that Monday, and she drove him to the bank after. That’s all I know about the money, and that’s all I asked.
The drawers are still hanging over register one at the feed store. Jamar told me. He says the floors are dirty now, and nobody’s figured out the corner.
Thursday, ten to six, the door chimed, and a thin man in a gray work shirt got in line behind a kid buying energy drinks.
When it was his turn he took the brown wallet out and slid the soft card across the counter with two one-dollar bills folded the long way.
I fed it through. The machine printed.
I held the slip up between us so he could read the bottom box, the way you’d hold something up for a whole line to see.
08.
Morris nodded, put the card and the slip in his shirt pocket, and buttoned the flap.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who once kept quiet at a counter and still thinks about it.
For more family drama and buried truths, read about the divorcee who found herself with forty dinner plates and a fortune and the call that reopened a mystery from 1981. There’s also the stranger whose old tapes carried a message from a late mother.
