The Handwriting on Every Coin

“Every coin’s in there. Number, date, what I paid, who from, and the story. I wrote the story of every one. And on every holder, the same story, in my hand. A man at a coin show can sell you a coin, but he can’t sell you my handwriting. Thirty years I’ve walked those halls. Find somebody who knows my hand.”

I sat at my own kitchen table with that ledger until two in the morning.

The first entry is dated June 1971. A 1943 steel cent and two wheat cents from 1944 and 1945, in a small brown envelope.

Under it, in my father’s careful capitals, he had written that his mother put one cent away each Christmas his father was overseas so there would be something to count when he came home, and that on the envelope she wrote the words Harlan home in pencil. No pen has touched it since.

Number sixteen was the dollar. My father gave me this on the morning I left for Basic in 1963, at the kitchen door. He said a man ought to leave home with one thing in his pocket that does not spend. I did not spend it.

Number forty was a Carson City dollar he bought from a widow in Belding in 1974, who would take only a dollar for it though he offered her more three times.

Number ninety-one was a Mercury dime from Denver, with a date on it that made my hands go cold when I looked it up.

It was not a collection. It was a man’s autobiography written in nickels. And a man in a white van had driven it away for forty-two hundred dollars, believing the old man was dead.

Tucked under the cloth corner of the front cover was a business card gone soft as flannel. Dunleavy Coin and Stamp, Grand Ledge. Under it, in my father’s pencil: Mags. Honest. Will tell you what a thing is worth even when she wants it.

I called at ten past seven the next morning. I did not care how it looked.

Mags

She answered on the second ring. “Dunleavy Coin.”

“Ms. Dunleavy, my name is Glenn Hartnett. My father is Lloyd Hartnett. You might know him from the shows.”

The pause was so long I looked at the phone to see whether we had been cut off. “Glenn,” she said, and her voice changed.

“Lloyd’s boy. Oh, honey. I have a card on my counter I have not been able to mail. I bought it Monday and I have written his name on the envelope four times, and I could not make my hand finish the address. I heard it Saturday, standing right at Hob Kessel’s table, and Ozzie Toomey said it was so by lunch. Thirty years. He still owes me forty cents on a Wheat Back, and I kept meaning to tell him to forget it.”

“Mags, my father is alive.”

She made a sound I will never forget, the sound of a floor coming back up under a person.

“He’s in the hospital with pneumonia,” I said. “He’s sitting up. He told me to call you. He wrote on your card, in pencil, that you were honest.”

“That old goat,” Mags said, laughing and crying together. “Then who in God’s name sold the Hartnett collection?”

I told her all of it, down to the transmission. I did not want her to think my nephew was a monster, because he is not one.

She was quiet through it.