“Hey, look.”
Jenny opened up her little leather change purse and showed me.
“It’s a dime.”
“Yeah, Joey, it’s a dime.”
“So you have a dime. What?”
“It’s always there. I mean, there’s always one there.”
I just looked at her. Like she was crazy.
I started to get up. My butt was starting to hurt. We’d been on the front step for a half hour, maybe more. I knew she wanted to tell me something, but she was taking so long. I just wanted to go inside.
“Wait-wait-wait.”
I sat back down. “Come on … just ~”
“I mean I take it out and the next time I look, there’s another dime there.”
I looked at her to see if she was serious and then got up to go inside.
When I got to the front door, I told her, “I’m ten, I’m not stupid. You’re eight, you should know better.”
I went inside and mom and dad were watching Carol Burnett, so I sat down with them and watched for a while. It was a rerun, but a good one - the one where Tim Conway told the story about the Siamese elephants. Everyone on the show was rolling, my parents were rolling; I was on the floor, it was so funny.
Jenny came in a few minutes later but didn’t say anything else about the dime.
We had Sunday roast when the show was over, like always. Mom always did a pork roast on Sundays, just like her mom, Grandma Neff had always done.
While we were doing the washing up, Jenny came up next to me and squeezed something into my soapy hand. It was a dime. I shoved it in my pocket.
“Thanks.”
That’s about all I figured I could say without her starting up again about the story of it always being there, or always being replaced, I guess.
She nudged my hip and I looked down. Jenny had the change purse open so I could see that it was empty.
“Okay.”
Now she had an empty purse and I had a dime. I wasn’t sure how that made her point, but I was okay with it.
Later, when I was getting ready for bed, she knocked at my door. When I answered it, she said “Here’s another. See?” She handed me the dime and held up her change purse. It was empty.
“So?”
“They just keep coming.”
“Uh-huh.”
She said, “I’ll show you …” as I closed the door on her.
I woke up the next morning and wondered what the two dimes on my dresser were for, and then I remembered. I got to the table the same time as she did. She poured us both bowls of cereal and when I looked down, there was another shiny dime.
This went on all through the morning. I had eighty cents before I knew it. She just kept bringing them to me. After lunch, I waved at her to follow me to the back yard and we went to the gazebo to talk. “Lemme see the purse, Jenny.”
She handed the purse to me and I looked all over it from the outside, then I pried it open and turned it inside out. A dime fell out and I tucked it into the pocket of my jeans.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Grandma Neff gave it to me, remember?”
Once she said it, I did remember. She gotten it from our grandmother maybe two years ago when they came to visit last.
“Where did it come from before?”
She shrugged, which was fair. How was she supposed to know? It’s not like it came with a booklet or in a package. It was just a silly purse. We couldn’t ask Grandma Neff because she died months ago. Daddy said it was just that she was old and she never got better from breaking her hip.
“Did she say anything when she gave it to you?”
She puzzled a moment, then her face brightened, and then it got all bunched up.
“She … I forgot it til just now … she said to always keep a nickel in there in case I needed to make an emergency call for help. She said every girl should do that so she would be safe. She said she taught all her daughters and now it was my turn."
I thought about what she was saying.
“How long has this been happening? She’s been dead since Spring, right?” That would be almost six months. That would be a LOT of dimes. A LOT of LOT of dimes.
“I put it away and kinda forgot when she gave it to me. I only got it out and started using it this week. It was three days ago, I guess, and when I looked in, there was a dime. Just one dime, but then they just kept coming.
She looked at me like she was expecting me to say something really smart, and I couldn’t think of anything.
I leaned back and just looked around the yard, then I had an idea.
“You know what started costing a dime this year? A phone call.”
She nodded and peeked back in the purse.
She started to fish around in it. I figured she was getting out another dime.
I just shook my head. “It won’t do you any good, you know? They’ll just keep coming.”
She bobbed her head and zipped the purse back up.
“What did Grandpa Neff give you, Joey?”
“His pocket knife.”
“The one you lost when we went hiking?”
“Uh-huh.”
“ … wanna go to the park and swing?”
I didn’t much care to, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
We went to the park and swung, and that was that.
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