The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
The water went gray in about four minutes, and Noah ran to dump it and refill it from the kettle.
Lily took her job very seriously. She scrubbed each penny with a toothbrush, front and back, and held it up to the sun to see if it was shiny enough.
If it wasn’t, it went back in the tub. If it was, she said “good” to it before she set it down.
“You don’t have to talk to every one,” Noah told her.
“Yes, I do,” Lily said. “They had a bad day.”
I had to look down at my wrappers for a minute after she said that.
Rolling pennies is not hard, but it is slow. You count out five stacks of ten, you tip them into the paper tube, you fold over one end with your thumb and tap the roll against your knee to settle them, then you fold the other end. After about forty rolls, the tips of my fingers were sore.
Each finished roll went into a shoebox on the card table. I had saved shoeboxes for years for no reason at all, the way my mother did, and now I knew why.
Marie came over with four more from her hall closet and stayed an hour scrubbing beside the kids.
By Saturday supper we had a little over two hundred rolls in the boxes. That was about a hundred dollars. The pile in the driveway did not look like we had touched it.
He asked me that night, after his bath, sitting on the edge of his bed in pajamas with a hole in one knee.
“Mom,” he said. “What happens when your lunch money runs out?”
I was folding his clothes from the towel basket, the same basket I had been holding on the step the day before. “You mean on your account at school?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I put more money on it,” I said. “Why? Are you low? I just put twenty on it last week.”
“Not me,” Noah said. He picked at the hole in his pajama knee. “A kid in my class. He got the cheese sandwich on Thursday. And on Tuesday. And I think on Monday, but I’m not sure about Monday.”
I knew about the cheese sandwich. Every mother in our school knew.
When your child’s lunch account goes too far into the negative, they still feed him, but instead of the hot lunch on the tray he gets a cold cheese sandwich and a carton of milk.
“He gave his milk to Kaylee because she was still hungry,” Noah said. “And he said he likes cheese sandwiches. But he didn’t eat all of it.”
“Who was it, buddy?”
Noah shook his head. “I’m not supposed to say. Mrs. Bauer says lunch money is private, like underwear.” He thought about that. “That’s what she said.”
I sat down on the bed beside him.
“Mom,” he said. “Can some of the pennies go to lunch?”
I did not answer him that night. I said, “Let me think about it,” and kissed him on the forehead, and went out to the kitchen and stood at the window in the dark looking at that pile.
I want to be honest about this part, too. That nine hundred and fifteen dollars was not extra money.
My last check from Dale was supposed to carry us across the gap until my first check from the co-op, which would not come until the end of the following week.