Part Sixteen: Noah
I didn’t hear the office door open behind me.
I didn’t know Noah was there until he spoke.
“Mr. Heckert?”
Everybody turned around.
Noah was standing in the doorway in his school clothes. He was holding his backpack by one strap. He’d come from class. I found out later he’d asked his teacher if he could go to the bathroom and came straight to the office instead.
He looked at Dale.
Dale looked at him. His face went very still.
“Hi, Noah,” he said quietly. “Your mom brought you to the shop sometimes. When you were little.”
“I remember,” Noah said. “You gave me a lollipop from the jar.”
“That’s right,” Dale said.
Noah walked into the office. He stopped in front of Dale. He looked at the Folgers can on the counter.
“Is that for the cheese sandwich kids?” he asked.
Dale nodded.
“The whole school,” he said. “Every grade.”
Noah thought about that for a long moment. The way he thinks about everything, slowly and seriously.
Then he said something none of us expected.
“Did you ever get the cheese sandwich?” he asked. “When you were little?”
Dale stared at him.
Nobody had told Noah anything. He’d been standing in the doorway. I don’t know how much he heard.
“Yes,” Dale said finally. His voice was barely a whisper. “Every day. For three years.”
Noah nodded slowly.
“Mason gets it,” he said. “In my class. Tyler calls him Cheese Boy.”
Dale closed his eyes.
“I didn’t say anything to Tyler,” Noah said. “I didn’t know what to say.”
He looked up at Dale.
“Did anybody say anything?” he asked. “When they called you that?”
Dale shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Nobody ever did.”
Noah was quiet for a long time.
Then he reached into his coat pocket.
He pulled out a penny.
It was shiny and clean. One of ours. I found out later he’d kept it. Slipped it into his pocket on the last day of rolling, when I wasn’t looking. He said he wanted one to remember.
He held it out to Dale.
“This is one of yours,” he said. “We washed it. It was really dirty.”
Dale looked at the penny in Noah’s palm.
He didn’t take it right away.
“Why are you giving me this?” he asked.
Noah thought about it.
“Because you said sorry to my mom,” he said. “And because nobody said anything when they called you Cheese.”
He held it out a little further.
“So I’m saying something,” Noah said. “I’m sorry they called you that.”
Dale Heckert took the penny.
He held it in his big scarred palm. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he sat back down in the little plastic chair and put his face in his hands.
Part Seventeen: Penny Saturday
The bank’s armored car came on Friday. They counted the pennies. Nine hundred fifteen dollars, every cent.
Mrs. Fogle applied nine hundred eight dollars and forty cents to the second-grade accounts. The leftover six dollars and sixty cents went into a jar on the cafeteria counter labeled For Whoever Needs It.
Dale’s coffee can paid off the rest of the school.
Every grade. Kindergarten through fifth. Nobody at Washington Elementary had a negative lunch balance for the first time in eleven years.
But that’s not the end of it.
The next week, Dale called me.
I almost didn’t answer. But I did.
“Becky,” he said. “I’ve got a question.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a jar,” he said. “At the shop. Under the counter. It’s been there since my dad opened the place. Every time somebody pays in cash, the change goes in the jar. Pennies, mostly.”
“How many pennies?” I asked.
He was quiet for a second.
“I had one of the guys weigh it,” he said. “About forty pounds. Maybe twelve thousand pennies. Fifty-seven years of them.”
“Dale,” I said. “What are you asking me?”
“I’m asking,” he said slowly, “if you and your kids would teach me how to roll them.”
I didn’t answer right away.
“Mrs. Fogle says the middle school has lunch debt too,” he said. “And the high school. And I was thinking. If people saw how it worked. If they saw us doing it. Maybe they’d bring their pennies too.”
He cleared his throat.
“I’ll wash them first,” he said. “Myself. No oil. I promise.”
Two Saturdays later, we set up folding tables in the Merrill Fire Hall.
Dale brought his jar. Twelve thousand pennies, washed in his own shop sink, shining like new.
I brought my blue dish tub and the plaid blanket with the burn hole. Noah brought the masking tape trick. Lily brought her stuffed rabbit and the fire truck dog song.
We put a sign on the door.
PENNY SATURDAY. Bring your change. Help roll. Every roll feeds a kid.
We thought maybe ten people would come.
Two hundred and forty showed up.
They came with coffee cans and mason jars and plastic bags and pickle jars full of change. Old men with fifty years of pennies in a shoebox. Kids with piggy banks. A woman from the nursing home who brought a quart jar of pennies she’d saved since her husband died.
Carl from the shop came with all four Heckert mechanics. The guys from the Rusty Nail came, the same ones who’d called Dale Cheese for forty-five years. They sat at a table in the back and rolled pennies for six hours.
Mrs. Fogle brought her mother’s old cafeteria apron and hung it on the wall behind the tables.
Dale sat at the head table with Noah and Lily.
He was terrible at rolling. His fingers were too big. He tore half the wrappers. Lily had to show him how to fold the ends four times.
“Like this, Mr. Dale,” she said patiently. “You tuck it. Then you push.”
“I’m tucking,” Dale said. “I’m pushing.”
“You’re squishing,” Lily said.
Noah laughed so hard he fell off his chair.
By the end of the day, we’d rolled four hundred and twelve thousand pennies.
Four thousand one hundred twenty dollars.
Enough to pay off the lunch debt at the middle school, with nine hundred left over for the high school.
