The Pennies That Fed A Grade

The sound woke me before I understood it. A long metal rush, like gravel going into a truck bed, except we were not getting gravel and it was ten past seven in the morning.

I pulled the curtain back and looked out at my own driveway.

There was a dump trailer backed up to the mouth of it, the kind Hale’s Auto kept out behind the shop for scrap. The bed was tilted up at the sky. And pouring off the end of it, in a slow brown river that would not stop, were pennies.

Thousands of them. Then tens of thousands. They came off the lip of that trailer and hit the gravel and spread, and the spreading did not quit. They ran up under my car. They filled the ruts. They piled against the bottom of the porch step and kept piling.

I stood there in my robe with my coffee going cold in my hand and I watched a man I had worked for empty a trailer of money onto the ground so I would have to crawl for it.

Mr. Hale himself was behind the wheel of the truck that pulled the trailer. He did not get out. He waited until the last penny slid off, and then he lowered the bed, and then he pulled forward just enough to clear my mailbox, and he rolled his window down.

“That’s your nine fifteen,” he called. “Counted it myself.”

He did not smile. That was the part I kept coming back to later. A man who was only joking would have smiled. He said it the way you would read a number off a receipt, and then he rolled his window back up and drove off down the county road, and the dust from his tires settled over the whole glittering mess of it.

Nine hundred and fifteen dollars. My last paycheck. The one he owed me for the two weeks I worked after I gave notice.

He paid it in ninety one thousand five hundred pennies, dumped in my driveway, because I had the nerve to quit.