The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
It took three trips with the book cart. The secretary, Deb, had to move her potted plant off the counter to make room, and one of the third grade teachers stopped in the hall and put her hand over her mouth.
Then Noah walked up to the counter.
He had been holding that roll since we left the house. He stood in front of Mrs. Fogle, and he held it out to her with both hands, the way the altar boys hold the cruets at church.
“This is the last one,” he said. “My sister made it. Sorry it’s sticky.”
Mrs. Fogle took it from him with both hands. She looked at the purple fingerprints and the crooked fold at the end.
Then she sat down hard in Deb’s office chair, and she held that roll against her chest, and she cried.
Not a lot. Just enough. She took her glasses off and let them hang on the beaded chain and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
“Noah Lund,” she said. “I am going to keep this one. I’m going to put a dollar bill in the register for it, and I’m going to keep this roll on my desk until the day I retire.”
Noah looked at me to see if that was allowed. I nodded. He looked back at Mrs. Fogle and said, “Okay. But you have to put it on the lunch money, too.”
“I will,” she said. “I promise.”
Lily, who had been very quiet, walked around the counter and gave Mrs. Fogle a hug around the middle. Mrs. Fogle hugged her back and said into her hair, “You’re the one who made it, aren’t you.”
“The pennies had a bad day,” Lily said. “So we gave them a bath.”
Mrs. Fogle posted on the school’s Facebook page at about nine thirty that morning.
It said that thanks to a mom who rolled ninety-one thousand five hundred pennies by hand with her two children, every lunch account in the second grade was paid off as of that morning, and no child in the second grade would be getting a cheese sandwich this month.
It did not say who had paid the pennies to me. Mrs. Fogle never knew, officially, and she never asked. It did not say Dale’s name. It did not say anybody’s name, not even mine.
It did not have to.
By noon, the whole town knew whose pennies they were. Ken had seen the dump. Marie had told the circle. Somebody at the co-op had heard I was starting there and why I’d left.
And there is only one man in our town with a rollback and three oil buckets and a reason to be angry at Becky Lund.
That afternoon I went out to the co-op to fill out my insurance papers before I started on Monday. My new boss, Mike, the store manager, came out of his office while I was at it.
He is about fifty, with a seed corn cap he never takes off, and he stood in the doorway with his arms folded and a little smile on his face.
“So I hear you’re good at counting,” he said.
I felt my face go red. “I guess you could say that.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I want you to know, we pay by direct deposit here. But if you’d ever rather have it in dollar bills, you let me know, and I’ll bring it out in a wheelbarrow myself.”