The Pennies That Fed A Grade

About an hour later his wife Donna came by with a lawn chair and a second wash tub from her own shed. She did not ask if I wanted help. She just set the tub down next to mine and rolled up her sleeves.

“You’re doing it wrong,” she said, which is the kindest thing an old farm woman knows how to say. “Smaller batches. The dirt loosens faster.”

She was right. We did smaller batches after that, and the work went quicker, and Donna and I talked about her grandkids and the price of hay and we never once talked about Mr. Hale, which was its own kind of talking about him.

She stayed until three. When she left she looked at the kids and the towels of drying pennies and she shook her head.

“Nine hundred dollars,” she said. “A man his age. His poor wife would be sick.”

Mr. Hale’s wife had been gone six years. I knew that. So did Donna. She was not being cruel. She was telling me, in the only way she had, that the whole county was going to measure this man against the memory of a decent woman, and he was going to come up short.

The kitchen table

Jeff got home Thursday night off his route. He came up the driveway in the dark and I heard him stop the truck, and then I heard nothing for a minute, and then I heard him come in the house real quiet.

He stood in the kitchen doorway. There were pennies drying on every towel we owned. There were coin wrappers I had bought at the bank spread across the table. There were my two kids asleep on the couch because they had rolled coins until they could not keep their eyes open.

“I heard about it at the Casey’s,” he said. “Three different people told me before I got to the gas pump.”

“I bet,” I said.

He looked at the table for a long moment. Then he took off his jacket and he sat down across from me and he picked up a coin wrapper and he started to roll.

I love my husband for a lot of reasons. That was one of the big ones, right there. He did not say we should sue. He did not say he would go have a word with Hale, which I think he wanted to do. He saw what I was doing and he sat down and did it with me.

“You know what these are for,” I said. It was not a question either.

“I figured,” he said. “The school.”

“Every kid in Dylan’s grade who’s behind,” I said. “Not just ours. All of them. Pat told me once there’s about forty children behind at any given time, and the whole grade’s debt is never more than a few hundred dollars. We’ve got nine hundred fifteen.”

Jeff rolled his wrapper and tapped it on the table to settle the coins.

“The man gave you a trailer of pennies to make you crawl,” he said. “And you’re going to feed a grade with it.”

“He already counted it,” I said. “It’s spent. It’s just a matter of getting it rolled.”

He laughed, soft, so he would not wake the kids. “Tara,” he said, “that is the meanest nice thing I ever heard.”