The Toll Booth Regular Who Died in 1994

The training for graveyard toll work is thin, so the real handover happens in the notes previous booth workers leave taped inside the cabinet. Most are practical — which card reader is temperamental, where the good torch is. One, in faded biro, said only: '2:15, lane 4, cash, blue car, DON'T KEEP THE COIN. Just wave him on. He's alright.'

I assumed a prank until my fourth night, when at 2:15 a car came through lane four — a boxy blue saloon, a model I couldn't place and later identified as something discontinued in the early nineties — and a man in his sixties wound down the window and held out exact change, coins warm and ordinary in my palm. He nodded, said 'goodnight, then,' and drove on. Pleasant. Unremarkable, except for the strangeness that lane four's automatic barrier didn't trigger the vehicle sensor, and my transaction log showed no vehicle for that timestamp — but the coins were real, in my hand, in the drawer.

He came most nights, always 2:15, always lane four, always the exact toll — which is itself impossible, because the toll has changed twice since the nineties, and he always paid the CURRENT amount, in current coins, from a car that predated both increases.

The note said don't keep the coin. I kept it once — put it in my own pocket instead of the drawer, out of pure contrariness. That night the booth lights failed at 2:15 and stayed off for exactly the minute he'd have passed, and something rapped the glass, once, at window height, and I put the coin in the drawer with hands that would not stay still. Never again.

I looked into it, the way you do. A booth worker died at that plaza in 1994 — heart attack, in the cabin, on a graveyard shift, found by the 6 a.m. relief. His name isn't the point. The point is the coin: I think he's still paying his way through, still commuting home from a shift that ended thirty years ago, and I think the note is right. He's alright. You just wave him on. And you never, ever keep the coin.