The Pennies That Fed A Grade

The driveway

So that is how I came to be standing in my robe looking at ninety one thousand pennies.

I want to tell you I was calm. I was not calm. My first feeling was the hot one, the one that makes your ears ring, and for about a minute I stood there and I thought about getting in my car and driving to that shop and saying every word I had.

But the car had pennies up under it, and the kids were going to be awake in twenty minutes, and some cold clear part of my mind said: he wants you to do that. He wants you up at the shop screaming so he can tell everybody who comes in for a water pump that Tara finally lost it. Do not give it to him.

So I did not. I went inside and I poured the cold coffee out and I made fresh, and I sat down at the kitchen table and I thought.

I thought about calling the law. Trespassing, I guess, or dumping. But what would they do. It was my money. He would say so, and he would be right, in a mean way. They would make him haul it off, maybe, and then I would still be out my nine hundred fifteen dollars and I would have spent a morning with a deputy taking pictures of my driveway.

I thought about a lawyer. I actually got as far as looking up the one in town, the one whose name is on the bench at the ballfield. And then I did the arithmetic. A lawyer would want more than nine hundred dollars just to pick up the phone. You do not hire a nine-hundred-dollar lawyer to chase a nine-hundred-dollar debt. The debt was already sitting in my driveway. He had, in his nasty way, paid me in full.

That was the thing I kept turning over. He had paid me. It was all there. He had counted it himself, he said, and I believed him, because a man petty enough to do this is petty enough to count.

It was my money. Every penny of it was mine.

And somewhere in that second cup of coffee, I stopped thinking about Mr. Hale at all, and I started thinking about a cold cheese sandwich.

The kids come out

Dylan came out first, in his pajama pants, hair every direction.

“Mom,” he said, at the window, “why is the driveway shiny?”

Maddie came out behind him. She is six. She looked for about two seconds and then she said what a six-year-old says.

“Are we rich?”

I laughed. I did not expect to laugh that morning, but she got it out of me.

“No, baby,” I said. “We are not rich. But a man owed Mama some money, and he left it in a silly way, and now we have a job to do.”

I made it a job on purpose. I have learned that with kids. You do not say a bad man did a cruel thing to hurt us. You say we have a job, and we are the kind of family that does the job.

So after breakfast I got the big galvanized wash tub out of the shed, the one Jeff’s mother used to use, and I got two buckets and the garden hose and a bag of rags and the two bottles of Dawn from under the sink. And we went out to the driveway in our oldest clothes, the three of us, and we started.

Because here is the thing about ninety one thousand pennies that lay in a dump trailer behind an auto shop. They are not clean pennies. They are greasy. They have shop grime on them and they have driveway grit on them, and if you are going to carry them anywhere that people will touch them, you cannot carry them like that.