Ninety-One Thousand Five Hundred Pennies
Part One: The Buckets
Dale Heckert tipped the last bucket at four o’clock on a Friday.
I heard it before I saw it. A sound like hail on a tin roof, except it didn’t stop. It went on and on, a rushing, rattling roar, and then a heavy slithering thud as the last of it slid out of the bucket and spread across my driveway.
I was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in my hand. I’d come home early to make supper before the kids’ Friday cartoons.
I walked out onto the porch.
Ninety-one thousand five hundred pennies lay on my gravel.
A copper mountain. Three feet high in the middle, spreading out in a wide fan toward the mailbox. They shone in the late September sun like something out of a fairy tale.
Except they were slick. Every single one of them. Coated in black, sticky motor oil. The smell hit me from the porch. Burnt, heavy, the smell of the bottom of a drain pan.
Dale stood beside his pickup with an empty five-gallon bucket in each hand.
He was sixty-one, built like a fire hydrant, with a gray crew cut and forearms covered in faded Navy tattoos. He wore the same thing he wore every day. Dickies work pants, a gray T-shirt with Heckert Auto & Dieselacross the back, and steel-toed boots with the laces knotted where they’d broken.
Behind him, in the bed of his truck, were seven more empty buckets.
My son, Noah, came out on the step behind me. He was eight. He’d been watching cartoons in his socks. His little sister, Lily, came out behind him, holding her stuffed rabbit by one ear. She was five.
They stood on the step and didn’t say a word.
Dale set down the empty buckets. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
It was a pay stub. My final paycheck. I could see the Heckert Auto logo at the top.
He took a roll of shop tape out of his other pocket, the silver kind we used on radiator hoses. He tore off a piece. He taped the pay stub to the side of one empty bucket.
Then he set the bucket on top of the copper mountain.
