Part Eighteen: The Driveway

The Monday after Penny Saturday, I came home from work and found a dump truck in my driveway.

It was from Lincoln County Aggregate. A man was spreading fresh gravel across the whole driveway. Clean, gray, crushed limestone, brand new.

Dale was standing beside the truck with his arms crossed.

“What is this?” I asked.

“The oil stain,” Dale said. “From the pennies. It’ll be there for years if you don’t replace the gravel.”

He uncrossed his arms.

“I had them dig out the top four inches,” he said. “Hauled the old stuff to the recycling yard. Put down new.”

I looked at the driveway. The dark fan-shaped stain was gone. Everything was clean and gray and smooth.

“Dale,” I said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

He reached into his shirt pocket.

He pulled out the penny Noah had given him. The shiny clean one. He’d drilled a tiny hole near the top and threaded it onto his key ring, next to his truck key and the key to the shop.

“I carry it every day now,” he said. “Every time I start the truck, I see it.”

He looked at it.

“Reminds me somebody finally said something,” he said.

Part Nineteen: One Year Later

It’s been a year now.

I still work at the co-op. Parts and inventory manager. The insurance is good. Noah’s asthma is under control. Lily hasn’t broken anything else, though not for lack of trying.

Jake still hauls logs out of Tomahawk. He says he still has nightmares about penny wrappers.

Dale still runs Heckert Auto & Diesel. Business dropped for a few months after the post. Then Penny Saturday happened, and it picked back up. People said they wanted to give the man a second chance.

He gives every new employee health insurance now. All of them. He told me it costs him almost two thousand dollars a month.

“Should’ve done it twenty years ago,” he said.

Mason, the boy in Noah’s class, eats a hot lunch every day now.

Tyler Beckman stopped calling him Cheese Boy. Noah told me why.

In October, a few weeks after Penny Saturday, Tyler said it in the lunch line. Noah stepped in front of Mason and said, loud enough for the whole cafeteria to hear, “Mr. Dale says nobody should get called that. He got called that when he was a kid, and it made him sad for forty-five years.”

Tyler didn’t say it again.

There’s a Penny Saturday every September now.

At the Merrill Fire Hall. The third Saturday of the month. Dale runs it. He bought folding tables and a commercial coin counter and a big banner that says EVERY PENNY COUNTS.

Last year, we rolled almost six hundred thousand pennies. Six thousand dollars. Enough to pay off the lunch debt for the whole school district, with a little left over to start a fund.

Dale named the fund.

It’s called the Irene Bauer Fund. Mrs. Fogle cried when he told her.

There’s a little brass plaque on the wall of the Washington Elementary cafeteria now, right next to the lunch line. Dale paid for it.

In memory of Irene Bauer, lunch lady, 1962–1993.

She paid for a boy’s lunch and never told him.

He finally found out.

No child in this school will ever eat a cheese sandwich again.

Last month, I stopped by Heckert’s to pick up a fuel filter for Jake’s truck.

The shop looked the same. Gray steel. Four bays. Coffee strong enough to strip paint. A tire-company calendar on the wall.

But there was something new on the parts counter. Right next to the register.

It was a jar.

A big glass pickle jar, half full of pennies. Clean, shining pennies.

Taped to the front was a piece of masking tape with handwriting on it. Blocky capital letters, pressed hard into the tape with a black marker.

FOR THE LUNCH KIDS. EVERY PENNY COUNTS.

And underneath, in smaller letters, a second line. I recognized the handwriting. It was a little crooked, like it had been written by somebody very carefully trying not to make a mistake.

THE END..!