The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
I stood there a long time. And what I kept coming back to was this: I did not want to buy groceries with money a man had thrown at me.
On Monday morning, after I talked to the woman at the state, I called the school and asked for the kitchen.
Mrs. Ann Fogle has run the lunchroom at our elementary school for twenty-two years.
She is sixty-six and wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she knew the name of every child in that building, plus which ones would not eat anything green.
“Becky Lund,” she said when she picked up. “Noah’s mom. What can I do for you, honey? Is Noah’s account low?”
“No,” I said. “I’m calling about the second grade. I’d like to know how much the whole grade owes. All of the negative balances, together.”
There was a pause on the line. I could hear trays clattering and somebody laughing in the background.
“I can’t give you anybody’s names,” she said carefully. “You understand that. I can’t tell you who owes what.”
“I don’t want names,” I said. “I just want the total. I’d like to pay it off.”
Another pause. “Hang on, honey. Let me go to the computer.”
“There are forty-one children in the second grade,” she said. “Twenty-three of them have a negative balance right now. Some of them only a few dollars. A couple of them close to sixty.”
She took a breath. “All together, it comes to nine hundred eight dollars and forty cents.”
I wrote it down. Nine hundred eight dollars and forty cents. My stomach turned over. Six dollars and sixty cents less than the pile in my driveway.
“I can pay that,” I said. “All of it. But I have to tell you, Mrs. Fogle, it’s going to come in pennies.”
“Pennies,” she said.
So I told her. I told her about the rollback and the buckets and the stub taped to the empty one. I did not tell her who did it. I did not say his name once, and she did not ask.
When I finished, she was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Oh, honey,” she said finally. Her voice was not steady. “Oh, Becky. You bring them whenever they’re ready. You bring them right to my office, and I’ll take care of every one.”
“And the six dollars and sixty cents left over,” I said. “Can that go on Lily’s account in kindergarten?”
“I’ll see to it myself,” Mrs. Fogle said.
I told Noah that night after school. We were back out in the driveway and the sun was warm on the gravel again, the kind of April day in the Northwoods when you take your coat off and then put it right back on.
“We’re going to use the pennies for lunch,” I said. “All of them. For your whole grade.”
He did not jump up or cheer. He just looked at me with his serious face, the one he gets from his dad, and nodded once.
“Even the kids who are mean?” he asked.
“Even them.”
“Okay,” he said, and went back to scrubbing harder than before.
Lily wanted to know if the lunch people would know the pennies came from her. I told her probably not. She thought about that and decided it was fine, because “the pennies will know.”
We worked every afternoon that week as soon as the bus dropped them off. Kyle had come on Sunday like he promised and rolled pennies on the tailgate of his pickup for six hours straight.