Part Four: Nobody to Call

That night, after the kids were in bed, I sat on the porch steps looking at the pile.

The moon had come up over the pines. The pennies glinted dully under the porch light, black and oily. The smell of motor oil drifted up on the cool September air.

I called Jake.

He was in a motel in Tomahawk. He hauled logs four days a week, three hundred miles a day, and slept in the cab or a motel when he couldn’t make it home.

I told him what happened.

He was quiet on the phone for a long time. Then he said something I won’t repeat.

“I’ll be home tomorrow night,” he said. “I’ll borrow my brother’s dump trailer. We’ll shovel the whole thing up and drive it back to his lot. Dump it right in front of his bay doors.”

“No,” I said.

“Beck—”

“No,” I said again. “That’s what he wants. He wants us to be as angry as he is.”

I’d already looked it up. Sitting on the porch steps with my phone.

Pennies are legal tender. There’s no federal law requiring anyone to accept them for a private debt, but there’s no law against paying with them either. Dale owed me nine hundred and fifteen dollars, and he’d paid me nine hundred and fifteen dollars.

Every cent.

There was nobody in Wisconsin to call about a man being cruel.

“Then take them to the bank,” Jake said. “Let them deal with it.”

“The bank won’t take them loose,” I said. “They have to be rolled.”

“Then the coin machine at the grocery store.”

The coin machine at County Market takes almost twelve percent. That’s more than a hundred dollars off the top.

And it would choke on the oil anyway. I could already picture it. Black sludge jamming the gears. A teenage manager glaring at me.

“So what are you going to do?” Jake asked.

I looked at the pile for a long time.

“I’m going to wash them,” I said.

Jake laughed. Then he stopped laughing.

“Beck,” he said. “That’s ninety-one thousand pennies.”

“Ninety-one thousand five hundred,” I said.

“That’ll take you weeks.”

“Probably,” I said.

Part Five: The Dish Tub

The next morning, Saturday, I got out the dish tub.

It was blue plastic, the big rectangular kind. I filled it with hot water from the kitchen and a long squirt of blue dish soap. The kind that’s supposed to get oil off baby ducks.

I carried it out to the driveway. I set it on a folding card table I’d set up next to the pile.

Noah came out first. He was still in his pajamas, a pair of flannel pants with dinosaurs on them.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“Washing pennies,” I said.

He looked at the pile. At the tub. At me.

“Can I help?” he asked.

I almost said no. I didn’t want my children touching motor oil. I didn’t want them to have any part of this.

But he was already rolling up his sleeves.

“Get your boots on,” I said. “And your old jeans. And put on gloves.”

Lily came out ten minutes later in her pink rain boots and a sweatshirt with a unicorn on it.

“I want to help too,” she said.

I spread an old wool blanket on the grass next to the card table. It was the one we used for picnics, red and black plaid, with a burn hole in one corner from a bonfire in 2019.

I set a smaller tub on the blanket. Hot water. Dish soap. Two old toothbrushes.

“Scrub them like you’re brushing their teeth,” I told Lily.

She took it very seriously.

That’s how we did it.

I shoveled pennies from the pile into a colander. I rinsed the worst of the oil off with the garden hose. Then I dumped them into the dish tubs.

Noah and Lily sat on the blanket and scrubbed. Hot water. Dish soap. Two sets of small hands in yellow rubber gloves that were too big for them.

When a batch was clean, they laid the pennies out on old towels to dry. Rows and rows of them, copper and shining in the sun.

I knelt in the gravel in my bandana and rolled.

I’d bought penny wrappers at the bank Saturday morning. The bank teller, a young woman named Kayla, looked at me strangely when I asked for two thousand of them.

“Two thousand?” she said.

“I have a lot of pennies,” I said.

Fifty pennies to a roll.

One thousand eight hundred thirty rolls.

You learn a rhythm. Stack ten. Stack ten. Stack ten. Stack ten. Stack ten. Slide them into the paper. Fold the ends.

Noah figured out that if you stacked them in groups of five on a strip of masking tape, you could count faster. Lily figured out that if you hummed while you scrubbed, it went quicker.

She hummed the same song for three hours. A song from a cartoon about a dog who drives a fire truck.

The shoeboxes on the card table filled one row at a time.

I’d gotten them from the shoe store in town. Twenty-five rolls fit in each box, lined up like little copper soldiers.

By Saturday night, we had eleven boxes.