He pulled his pockets inside out and spilled his change across the bureau. “Take a coin,” he said. His little girl looked over the small mound of silver, and then at his empty pockets. They reminded her of a puppy’s ears somehow. She picked up the only copper penny in the pile. It glinted brightly, perhaps knowing it was less valuable, so grateful to be chosen. “That’s a lucky penny,” her father said.” Keep it close and your luck won’t run out.”
She did as he said, and every so often he’d check, asking, “Where is it, then?” and she’d pull the coin out of her pocket or the cuff of her sleeve, and once even from her shoe. He chuckled at that. “There are more secure places to keep it.” He hadn’t noticed that penny loafers were popular that year, but then again, why would he? After all, she never noticed the trail of clues to the double life he’d been leading.
After he left home for his girlfriend with the brand new baby, it was the penny that comforted her. She still believed it was lucky, and thought, maybe if she stroked it like her mother’s bottle of gin, its good luck would again rub off on her. “Wishful thinking,” her red-eyed mother sniffed, shuffling her feet in her husband’s abandoned leather slippers. She pinched the coin between her fingers, then turned it over in her palm. “My brothers used to go pennying with coins like these.”
“What’s that? A game?”
“Lining train tracks with a bunch of them and letting the train flatten them.”
The image of a train derailed by spare change rose in the girl’s mind. “Why did they do that?”
She held out her hand for the coin.
Her mother tucked it in her bra instead. “A flattened penny becomes a good luck charm. I had one when I was young. I carried it around with me for years. And then, one time, a cop stopped me for speeding. I couldn’t afford a DUI ticket, so I slid my penny from my pocket to my mouth, and sucked it.”
“Why?”
“A friend told me that you can fool a breathalyzer by sucking pennies.”
“Oh really,” the daughter sneered. She knew more about such things than her mother thought she did.
The mother shrugged her shoulders. “Apparently copper alters the alcohol reading. Or it used to before all the machines got so smart.”
“So did it work out for you?” The daughter suddenly wanted to believe in something.
“No. The officer just laughed and said, ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Maybe that’s when my luck began to run out.”
If the mother had not already taken her lucky penny, the daughter would have given it to her just then. Her mother needed it more than she did, she could see that now. The daughter had time. She would make her own luck, bring it home like great tubs of pennies, solid and gleaming; set it at her mother’s feet, drink a toast, and let all the good luck in the world rub off on her.
Cheryl Snell writes poetry and fiction of all sizes. Her books include Bombay Trilogy and Geometries.Visit https://cherylsnell.weebly.com
for more of her work.
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