Joanie’s husband is a cop, and last year for Mother’s Day he gave Joanie a framed picture of their sons, Colin and Clive Jr., locked up in the station’s paddy wagon. She showed it to everyone: Colin and Clive smiled gleefully, their fingers wrapped around the bars. She told her husband that he should have added handcuffs.

Joanie also sees no shame in the "Bad Mommy" story. Colin and Clive were pouting about her refusal to take them to a water park during the peak of summer heat. Colin—the older of the two—tried guilt, announcing she was a bad mommy. He danced around the house chanting, "You’re a bad mommy. You’re a bad mommy." He recruited Clive, who Joanie believes is sweeter in nature than his older sibling, and Clive began chanting, too. Joanie says they put on their swimming trunks, wrapped beach towels around their heads, and ran through the house clapping their hands and stomping their feet, screaming, "You’re a bad mommy! You’re a bad mommy!" Eventually, she grabbed them both by the ears, dragged them outside, and locked the door behind them. When their shocked faces appeared, pressed flat against the patio doors, she sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, flipping through a magazine and drinking lemonade. "Who’s a bad mommy now?" she asked.

If the story tempts one to ask about the true nature of "bad mommies," Joanie is quick to point out that she locked them out for only an hour and the hose was right next to the patio. "They had water any time one of them was smart enough to think of it," she says.

Fear isn’t the primary reason Joanie’s requested my presence at the Open Pantry, a point reiterated by my wife after I explained why I was headed to the Sherman Ave. store in the middle of the night. My wife thinks I don’t get paid enough to be on 24-hour call, but that’s the business. Climb the corporate ladder and be prepared for the trade-offs. On a daily basis, I don’t have to deal with the desperation of people buying beer with pennies collected from couch cushions or the antagonism of twelve-year-olds who want to use their lunch money to buy cigarettes, but I do have to cover shifts for sick employees and check out any problems my employees report.

"Why doesn’t she just lock this guy outside and drink a lemonade?" Iris asked. "Maybe, in addition to Mommy of the Year, she could be Employee of the Month." Iris was lying on the bed, fanning herself with a copy of last week’s art section. Her belly blossomed before her, and her feet were elevated on my pillow.

"Are you having an affair?" she asked suddenly. Her face glowed, slick with sweat. "Is that it?"

Joanie says pregnancy wreaks havoc on the system. She told me she frequently thought about smothering her husband with a pillow when she was pregnant with Clive. "I just kept thinking about Colin—what a monster he was even at two—and hating my husband for knocking me up again," she said. "But it was just hormones, I didn’t really want him dead."

"Of course I’m not having an affair," I told Iris. Joanie advised me to keep my answers to Iris short. "Don’t say too much," she said. "You can’t win with an angry, pregnant woman. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be."

"What if something happens?" Iris asked. The late stages of her pregnancy had been wracked with fear. She worried not so much about her own health or that our child would someday announce that Iris was a bad mommy, but about becoming a single mother. Our lives had become regimented by Iris’ assessment of risk factors in my life: quit smoking, wear a helmet when biking, wear flip-flops in the shower at the gym. The world was fraught with danger, and Iris’ list of precautions seemed endless.

"It’s nothing to worry about," I told Iris. I leaned over and kissed her belly. "Some old guy with a complaint about the price of gas."

Iris looked unconvinced.

"Who isn’t complaining about the price of gas these days?" I said. "I’ll be back in an hour and I’ll leave my cell phone on. You can call me whenever you want."

"Okay," she finally said, "bring me an Icee when you come home."

When I get to Sherman Ave., Joanie is outside smoking a cigarette. Her thin face is ghoulish beneath the Open Pantry sign’s blue light. She shakes a cigarette loose from the pack and offers it to me after I park my car. "It’s okay. Clive thinks I haven’t had a cigarette since I found out I was pregnant with Colin. What Iris doesn’t know won’t hurt her."

She puts the second cigarette in her mouth, lights it, and hands it to me. "Here. Smoke it fast. The Gas Geezer should be here any minute."

Joanie checks her watch and gazes into the darkness. "He shows up on foot. Watch for the red gas can."

When Joanie calls me in the office from her home during the day, she isn’t really complaining about this guy as much as sharing her morbid fascination with his idiosyncrasies. She’s the only woman on my staff who’s asked for the graveyard shift, but I think she gets lonely. She thinks I’ll be able to appreciate seeing this guy, as if we’re two teenage conspirators marveling at the insanity of adult lives, the misguided passion with which adults throw themselves into the world, caring about the mundane and worrying about the unlikely.

Joanie is the only employee close to my age. She doesn’t have a peer group at the Open Pantry and neither do I. Most of my workers are college age. Amid a sea of pierced faces, ever-changing hair colors, and indie band T-shirts, it’s nice to have a comrade with sensible shoes who couldn’t care less about the humiliation of wearing an Open Pantry smock. If I’m not thinking about it, I forget I’m no longer twenty-five. I feel like the same me I was then, but if I catch a glimpse of myself in the security mirror behind the counter, I realize I’ve thickened in the middle and my hair is thinning. My oxford shirt, khakis, and belt remind me that instead of clinging to my youthful mantra of having doubts about anyone over thirty, I should be wearing a T-shirt that brazenly pronounces I’m not to be trusted.

Sometimes Joanie calls me at home at the beginning of her shift just to talk. I tell Iris it’s harmless, but she’s convinced the intimacy of shared conversations, even about work, can lead to other intimacies, another hazard added to her list.

"Don’t let me forget to take an Icee home," I tell Joanie.

"Gotcha." She stubs out her cigarette. "C’mon." She takes my half-finished cigarette and deposits it in the ashtray. "It’s almost showtime."

The blast from the air conditioner in the store reminds me that I’ve been sweating. The cotton oxford sticks to my back and an uncomfortable ring of sweat soaks the waistband of my pants. If I weren’t the regional manager, I’d unlace my shoes and pull off my socks, letting my bare feet stretch against the linoleum’s coolness.

Joanie’s already placed a second stool from the storeroom behind the counter. She pats it and I sit down. We stare out the window, watching for the red, metallic gas container. The security monitors broadcast four vantage points of the empty store.

"He better show up," Joanie says. "He will show up," she adds, as if the power of positive thinking will conjure the Gas Geezer. "He’s been in every Tuesday and Thursday for a month."

"He’ll be here," I say, even though I’m not sure why I’m here. The guy is weird, not necessarily dangerous. It feels, for a brief instance, as though I’m back in high school, sneaking out of the house for a party that never materializes, passing time driving around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to music. Music. Another thing the kids complain about. They want to play their own music while they work, instead of the radio.

I shift my focus from the window to the store, looking for something to do while we wait. Maybe clean the glass or sweep the floor, but instead I want a pack of cigarettes. I could leave them here with Joanie, or lock them in the filing cabinet in the office. I could stop by during the day for a cigarette break with my other employees just to chat with them. I could get them the stereo they want for the store.

I stand up and reach for a pack, but my hand stops in mid-air. The straight, clean stacks of brands have been altered into a checkerboard quilt, the Marlboros and Camels and American Spirits disturbed from their ordinary stripes.

"Did you do this?"

Joanie looks over her shoulder and nods.

"Why on earth would you do that?"

"Keeps the kids busy, especially if Shauna rolls in with a hangover. She can’t work on autopilot. It forces her to read." She shrugs. "Geez, you sounded like a parent for a minute there." She sticks her tongue out at me.

Before I can tell her she needs to fix this mess, she says, "He’s here." She grabs my arm and pulls me to the window. "There."

At the corner of the lot, I can barely make out a red rectangle, but then a leg steps into the light, followed by the rest of a body. He moves swiftly to the gas pump. In the light, he looks bony. He’s wearing a short-sleeve light blue shirt, and from the back, he looks to have only a few straggling gray hairs. He sets the gas can down and reaches into the back pocket of his chinos for his wallet. He still seems normal enough.

"What does he do with one gallon of gas at this time of night?" I ask Joanie, but she’s already tugging on my arm.

"Okay, stand here." She positions me behind the register, jogs to the end of the counter, and slips out the gate into the main store.

"Where are you going?" My voice comes out higher than I’d like and I sound as though I’m crossing the threshold from puberty to manhood.

"Wait on him."

"Why me? You wait on him."

"You wait on him," she says, mocking me. "What’s the matter? Chicken?"

"No."

"Yes."

"Joanie, it’s your job to wait on people."

"You’re a bad manager." She stomps her foot and claps her hands. "You’re a bad manager. You’re a bad manager." Joanie’s laughing now. She stomps her feet, pumping her hand through the air. A one-woman parade, she heads for the storeroom, chanting as she goes.

"Where are you going?" I ask her.

"Relax. I’ll watch you through the cooler."

She rustles around in the back room and then, as if to prove she’s earnest in her voyeurism, her white hand pushes apart the bottles of Gatorade, waves furiously, and then disappears.

The bells on the door jingle, and the Gas Geezer walks in. He puts the gas can on the floor, and straightens himself. He’s an older guy, probably in his mid-to-late sixties. His face is sweaty, and he’s wearing a red striped bowtie. His right hand is thrust in his pocket, and I instinctively examine him, looking for distinguishing characteristics, just in case.

"Good evening, sir." I smile, a model of the training video we force new hires to sit through. "How can I help you this evening?" My voice sounds mechanical, even to me.

He pulls his fisted hand from his pocket and thrusts a wrinkled receipt at me.

I straighten the yellow slip. "Yes?"

"Sign says $2.93 a gallon. I pumped .997 gallons. You charged me $2.93." His face grows redder. He points at the receipt again.

I explain how we set our price, how the regulation of cost is set by a number of factors—high demand, world crude-oil markets, refining and distribution costs, and state-regulated markup laws—but that’s not what he’s looking for.

He cuts me off. "I pumped .997 gallons. I shouldn’t have paid $2.93. You owe me a penny."

"It’s a range," I try to explain. "If you kept pumping, the price wouldn’t change. You could even go a little bit beyond a gallon for the same price."

"You think people won’t notice a penny. You think they don’t care. But I do, I care." He slams his fist on the counter.

I look at the cooler, but I don’t see Joanie. I don’t know how to convince this guy that we’re not trying to rip him off. The only thought that comes to me is that our government periodically considers discontinuing the production of the penny and that decidedly seems like the wrong thing to say.

"You owe me," he says. "You owe me."

"Okay," I say, but I have no idea what that means.

Then Joanie’s beside me. She nudges me out of the way. "Hey, guy," she says to the Gas Geezer and his faces releases the tension.

"Fluxions," he says to Joanie.

"I know," she says. She smiles at him.

"Infinitesimal increments that don’t seem to have a value of their own," he says. He points outside to the gas pumps. "When repeated in pattern, they aggregate to a significant quantity."

"Uh-huh," Joanie says absently. She reaches over to the "Take a Penny, Leave a Penny" cup and picks one up. She tosses it over the counter to the Gas Geezer.

He presses it in his palm. "Thank you," he says. He picks up the gas can. He waves to Joanie through the glass as the door closes behind him.

Joanie hoists herself onto the counter. "Crazy, huh?"

"Where’d you learn that trick?"

"If Colin has a temper tantrum, put a piece of watermelon in his hand. He wants to freak out, but he’s got watermelon. It distracts him. Watermelon. Pennies. Same difference."

I nudge Joanie over on the counter and sit next to her. Both of us stare out the window, even though the Gas Geezer is gone. "What’s with the gas? Why does he come back?"

"Who knows?" Joanie shrugs. She bumps her shoulder against mine, as if she can tell I’m disappointed with her answer. "Why are any of us here?" she says. "I need a smoke."

While Joanie is outside, I place a super-sized cup under the Icee machine’s nozzle and pull the lever. The machine builds up to a steady flow. When I was a kid, I loved sno-cones: shaved ice and syrup poured over the top. The flavor started as a pastel smear and darkened, until it permeated the top of the cone. Now, the machine does the mixing, the ice and sugar syrup kept in constant motion by a tumbler. I’ve told Iris we could make sno-cones at home using Kool-Aid. It’d be fun, I’ve told her, but she wants Icees. When the shocking blue liquid borders on pouring over the bubble-shaped lid, I stop the machine, then go outside.

It’s still hot, even though the sun went down hours ago. The Icee starts to numb my fingertips, but condensation is already tracing the cup’s seams. By the time I get home to Iris, the Icee will slip from crisp sweet crystals to syrup and a soggy cup.

I say goodnight to Joanie and wait until she’s behind the counter to back my car out of the lot. I turn the radio on and flip through the stations. I want a song I know the words to, but I can’t find anything I recognize. Instead, I settle for silence. As the car moves through the darkness, I look for the incremental changes I can’t see but know are happening.