That evening, I called a lawyer friend of my sister. She explained that pennies were legal tender, and because Curtis had paid the full amount, there wasn’t technically anything I could do. Wade, the children’s father, was working near Ashland. When I told him what happened, he offered to drive down and dump every penny outside Curtis’s shop. I refused. I didn’t want our children learning that cruelty deserved more cruelty.

A grocery store coin machine would charge almost eleven percent, and the greasy coins would probably destroy it anyway. So Saturday morning, I dragged my grandmother’s old plastic washtub from the shed. Eli and Rosie spread their Spider-Man blanket across the driveway. We filled the tub with hot water and dish soap, then began washing. The children scrubbed handfuls of pennies while I dried and sorted them. I calculated that 87,200 pennies meant 1,744 rolls of fifty. The number made the children cheer. We started filling shoeboxes with our finished rolls, unaware that one question from Eli would soon change everything about how I viewed those coins.