The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
I laughed so hard I had to put my pen down. It was the first time I had really laughed all week, and it felt like something heavy rolling off my chest.
Thursday morning I was standing at the kitchen counter in my robe, making Noah’s peanut butter sandwich for his backpack. My phone rang at seven forty.
It was the school. My heart went straight up into my throat.
“Becky,” Mrs. Fogle said. Her voice was low, like she did not want anybody to hear. “You’d better come down here. Dale Heckert is standing in my office, and he’s asking for you.”
I put the kids on the bus, because I did not want them in the middle of whatever this was, and I drove the six miles to the school with both hands on the wheel.
He was sitting in one of the little plastic chairs outside the principal’s office, the kind they make kids sit in when they have been sent down.
He had his cap in his hands and he was turning it around and around by the brim.
He stood up when I came in. He looked older than he had a week ago. He had not shaved. His eyes were red around the edges.
“Becky,” he said.
“Dale.”
Mrs. Fogle was standing in the door of the lunchroom office with her arms folded across her chest. She did not leave. I was grateful to her for that. Deb was at her desk pretending to type and not typing anything.
“I came in to talk to Ann about something,” Dale said. “And she said I should wait and talk to you first. So I waited.”
He reached into his coat pocket. My stomach dropped, I don’t know why. Then he pulled out a checkbook, a regular one with a blue vinyl cover, the same shop checkbook I had balanced every month for six years.
“Tanner’s account,” he said. His voice cracked on the name. “My grandson. Tanner. He’s in Noah’s class. He was one of them.”
I did not say anything. I could not have said anything if I had tried.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Scott got laid off at the mill in November, you know that. And Tanner’s mom is working two jobs. And I didn’t know the boy was getting the cheese sandwich. Nobody told me. I didn’t ask.”
He stopped and looked at the floor.
“He told me about it last night,” Dale said. “At supper. He was so happy. He said some kid’s mom paid off everybody’s lunch, and he got chicken nuggets for lunch. And then my son told me what everybody in town has been telling everybody else since yesterday noon.”
He looked up at me then. His eyes were wet.
“Forty-one dollars and fifty cents,” he said. “That’s what my grandson owed. You paid it with the money I dumped in your driveway. You paid my grandson’s lunch with my own spite.”
The office was so quiet I could hear the clock over the door.
“I came in this morning to pay off the third grade,” Dale said. He opened the checkbook. “Ann already told me the number. Eleven hundred twenty-six dollars and seventy-five cents. I wrote it out. I wanted you to see it before I gave it to her.”
“That’s not my business, Dale,” I said. “That’s between you and Mrs. Fogle.”
“I know,” he said. “But I wanted you to see it anyway.”