The Handwriting on Every Coin

The Empty Case

The felt still held the shape of them.

That was the first thing I saw when I lifted the lid on my father’s coin case that Thursday evening, standing in the back room of the farmhouse with my coat still on.

Rows of flat rectangles were pressed into dark green felt, each one where a cardboard holder had sat for years, like the tracks of something small that had walked off in the night.

I had come for one coin. My father, Lloyd Hartnett, eighty-four years old, had spent twenty days in the county hospital with pneumonia, the first four with a mask on his face and a nurse checking his pulse every hour.

That morning, for the first time, he had sat up against the pillows and looked at me like himself.

“Glenn,” he said. “I want my father’s dollar. The silver one, the 1921. Bring it Sunday. I want to hold it while I get my wind back. It’s in the first tray, left side. Mind you hold it by the edge.”

“By the edge, Dad. Never the face.”

He nodded and closed his eyes, satisfied. I sat beside him a while, thinking how a man can lose his whole breath and still care how a coin gets handled.

So I drove the forty minutes from Greenville after work, out past Lyons on the gravel road, to the white farmhouse where I grew up. I used the key under the milk can.

The dishes in the kitchen were done and the cat bowls were full, because my nephew Brett had been coming by every other day to look after the place.

Down the little hall is the room my father calls the coin room and my late mother called the shrine.

It has a card table, a green banker’s lamp, a dehumidifier that hums all year, and a gray steel cabinet with the case on top of it. The lid was down but not latched.

I lifted it and looked at the felt, and I stood there longer than I would like to admit.

I opened the trays one at a time, left to right, as though the coins might be hiding under a flap. I pulled out the cabinet drawers.

Then the steel box where he kept the gold pieces, the one whose combination my father had given Brett at fourteen on the theory that a boy trusted with a secret keeps it. Open and empty.

The dehumidifier hummed.

Four hundred and twelve coins, I would learn later, because my father counted everything. Fifty years of them. I looked at the rectangles in the felt and not one coin was left to tell me it had ever been there.