The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
He did not say one word about Dale the whole time, which for Kyle is a kind of miracle.
And I counted. Over and over, I counted. Because there was a part of me that half hoped Dale had shorted me. If he had shorted me even one penny, it would have been a thing I could call somebody about.
But he had not. Every roll was full, and every box held what it was supposed to hold. Dale had counted out every one of those pennies before he dumped them, and I knew it the way I knew his handwriting.
That was the worst part, in a way. He had not been careless. He had been careful.
He had spent days, maybe a week, ordering boxes of rolled pennies from the bank in Rhinelander, breaking every roll open, and pouring them into his oil buckets.
I did not forgive him that week. I want to be clear. But I started, a little, to understand him. And understanding a person is the first step to something, even if you do not know yet what that something is.
On Tuesday afternoon, we came to the end of the pile.
Lily had been eating a grape jelly sandwich for her after-school snack, and she had not washed her hands, and I did not have the heart to make her stop and wash.
She scrubbed the last batch with her jelly fingers and then she held out her hand to me.
“I want to make one,” she said.
So I showed her. Five stacks of ten. She counted out loud, every one, and when she lost track at thirty-four she started over without complaining. Noah sat beside her and did not help unless she asked him to.
She tipped them into the wrapper and folded one end down with both thumbs, and then she tapped it on her knee like she had watched me do two thousand times, and folded the other end.
The paper was sticky with purple fingerprints. One end was folded crooked. It was the ugliest roll of pennies I have ever seen in my life, and I would not trade it for a bar of gold.
“Is that the last one?” Noah asked.
I looked at the driveway. I looked at the boxes on the card table. I picked up the last roll and set it on top of the stack in the last shoebox.
“That’s the last one,” I said. “Eighteen hundred and thirty.”
Lily clapped. Ken, who had been sitting in his folding chair with his thermos, set the thermos down very carefully on the gravel and put his hand over his eyes for a minute. Marie patted his shoulder.
Noah reached over and took the sticky roll back out of the shoebox.
“Can I give this one to the lunch lady?” he asked. “Myself?”
Wednesday morning, Ken helped me load the shoeboxes into the car before the bus came. The back end sat down on its springs, and Ken told me to watch the frost heaves on the county road.
I drove the kids to school myself that morning instead of putting them on the bus.
Noah sat in the back with his feet up on a shoebox and the last roll held in both hands in his lap, the whole six miles.
Mrs. Fogle was waiting at the front door of the school with the principal and a book cart from the library.
The principal, Mr. Halvorsen, is a big man who coached football at the high school before he went into administration, and he picked up shoeboxes four at a time like they weighed nothing.