The Penny

by Joyce Meyer

  I squinted, looked a little harder. If she hadn’t been Miss Shaw, I would’ve called her crazy.

  “I see in you a determination that not everyone has.”

  I looked at her instead of the mirror.

  “You have the strength to trust, Jenny. You hang onto that, because it’s been given to you as a special gift. It’s the kind of strength that’s the most hard to find.”

  I examined the toe of my shoe in discomfort. “My sister says Grace Kelly hated her first on-screen performance in High Noon.” Talking about Grace was the only way I could think of to redirect the conversation. “After Grace watched her own movie, she hired a new acting coach. Jean read it in Photoplay this week. Grace wasn’t happy with herself because she said she could look into Gary Cooper’s face and see everything he was thinking, but when she looked into her own face she couldn’t see anything at all.”

  “With all the talk about Grace Kelly, it sounds like your sister wants to live someone else’s life instead of her own.”

  “She’s obsessed,” I said, shrugging.

  Then as if she’d given me free rein, I let everything go, all at once. “Lots of people want to live your life,” I blurted. “You should hear the things they say about you. They say all the same things about you that Jean likes to say about Grace Kelly.”

  “Ah.” I could see her face behind mine in the mirror. I hadn’t expected this reaction. She laughed, but she sounded sad.

  “They want to know why you always wear white gloves. They talk about how your manners are so good and how you lacquer your hair and how you put lipstick on so it never smears on your teeth. They all want to know about—” The grave.

  “People have a way of looking at other people and seeing things the way they think them to be, not the way they really are. You’ve got to remember that always, Jenny Blake.”

  I’d taken Daddy’s money for streetcar fare and lied to Mama about seeing Aurelia and ferreted out details about my new employer’s life. If people knew what I’d done, there was no end to the bad things they could think about me.

  It was easy for Miss Shaw to talk about messages from God and knowing who to love—her life had been completely different from mine. I would have bet she didn’t have a daddy who told her she’d never amount to anything. I would have bet she didn’t have a daddy who thought she’d never done anything right.

  I’d give anything to live free like Miss Shaw.

  Chapter Eight

  I’d never seen anything like the Fourth of July Independence Day celebration going on in Aurelia’s neighborhood. Up and down the street, flags flew beside awnings that had been scrubbed bright. People greeted each other from stoops or shouted through open screen doors. Women chitchatted as they shifted their babies from one hip to another. A stickball game had drawn a crowd into an empty lot, and umbrellas spun like pinwheels when revelers ducked beneath them for shade.

  When Aurelia saw me, she stood still for a second, like she was blinded by the sight of me. Then she bounded forward, darting between about fifteen kin in her trodden-grass yard. As she wove toward me, I tried to figure out how to show my feelings, to show her how sad it made me that it took this many days to see her again. How if it were up to me, I’d be over here all the time, playing in the water hose, and leaving secret notes in the hollow of the elm tree in Aurelia’s front yard, and devouring Aunt Maureen’s hotcakes with butter and molasses dripping down, and carrying bottles to the confectionery store with her so we could trade them in for two cents apiece.

  Maybe it was Miss Shaw and the way she’d talked to me about myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking how Aurelia Crockett being my friend was like somebody giving me a present I didn’t deserve. When she got there, I hadn’t found any words yet. The only thing to do was to hug and laugh and hug again.

  “Girl,” she said, “I thought you’d never get over to see us again.”

  Miss Shaw said my eyes showed I had strength to trust. Aurelia was the one I thought I might be able to trust someday. Let me tell you, trust didn’t come easy. Everyone I’d trusted before had hurt me.

  “I don’t have many chances. But I got one now.”

  Daddy had finally gotten a decent job from the real estate office—they’d assured him it might last three weeks. They’d hired him, he informed us, to break up cement and pull out metal posts. They’d told him they needed somebody with “arms of steel,” he bragged.

  Which meant, for a little while at least, we could count our lives as our own.

  I’d used my very first Shaw Jeweler’s wages to hop the streetcar to the Ville and visit Aurelia.

  Above everything, I heard the crisp sound of Eddie Crockett’s horn, its running tones and sharp style falling in pleasant chords on my shoulders along with the hot sun. I shaded my eyes to find Aurelia’s daddy above me, his legs dangling from a window ledge on the second story, wailing on his trumpet to beat the band. I waved.

  He took the instrument from his mouth and shouted, “How’s the job going, girl?”

  I shot him a thumbs-up sign, which he answered with three warm bleats of his horn.

  When he began playing again, men in sweat-stained hats bobbed their heads to Eddie’s song, staying one lazy beat behind the tempo.

  The Ville smelled like stale cooking and strong coffee and old tire rubber. A swarm of boys raced toward me, playing a game of grab-and-go. Aurelia had told me plenty about how they walked along whistling, searching for the right spot, until they found a sign that said BEWARE OF DOG on a gate, and they’d grab the gate open and tear out of there faster than anything.

  There was always something going on at the Crocketts’ house. “We’re burning stuff,” Aurelia said, keeping hold of my arm.

  “What?”

  “Come see.” She yanked me into a nest of cousins where Darnell was showing Garland how to hold a magnifying glass to catch the sun.

  “Get out of the way!” Darnell shoved Aurelia’s leg. “You’re blocking it.”

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me down to my knees, where we both watched Darnell’s two hands tighten over Garland’s. “You keep fooling with it,” Darnell instructed, “until you get the whole sun in one place.”

  Garland squinted up, peering into the sky.

  “Not there, Garland. Down here. You’re bringing it to the ground, like this.”

  No less than a dozen eyes followed the lens as Darnell slow-circled the magnifier. It snagged a glint of sun. Darnell adjusted the angle and, beneath it, a pinpoint of light fell on a leaf. “There.” With a light jerk to Garland’s hands, he released them. “Don’t move. Hold right there.”

  Garland clutched the handle, trying hard. He sat so still for so long, sweat beaded along the edges of his steel-wool hair. Slowly, the point on the leaf turned brown, then black. Smoke spiraled from it. A flame burst forth.

  “Look at that!” somebody shouted. But before we got any further, Darnell pounded the ground to get the fire out.

  Aurelia held her hand out for the magnifier. “You’ve done it plenty, Garland. Let Jenny try it.”

  The screen door behind us swung open and here came Aurelia’s aunt carrying a colossal watermelon. “You all get on over there and play ball. It’ll do you good.” Aunt Maureen set the watermelon down hard, quoting Scripture the whole way. She could rattle it off as easy as I could recount the alphabet. “Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle!” she announced. To Darnell and Aurelia: “You keep teaching everybody to catch things on fire, this whole place will be gone by morning. As if that box of firecrackers you bought wasn’t enough.” Then, “Eddie, you get on down here and stop persecuting the neighbors. I’m not about to cut up this melon on my own.”

  Eddie Crockett folded his legs inside the window. Darnell poked the magnifying glass into the pocket of his jeans. It was clear who held the authority around here.

  “Can I do some firecrackers tonight?” I had a way of talking to Aurelia that I couldn’t u
se with anybody else. I couldn’t tell Daddy what I was thinking, and Mama didn’t respond—I tried to tell her things and she wasn’t there even when she was. I’d open my mouth and she’d just stare at me like she wanted to be invisible, like she wanted to disappear from the room every time I walked into it.

  “I’ll talk Darnell into letting you do some black cats. I’ll crack his head if he doesn’t share them with the whole family.” Then, in a voice of conspiracy, “Did your Great-Aunt Flo come visit yet? Mine did.”

  I didn’t know any great-aunts. I sure didn’t think I had one named Flo. And as far as I knew, neither did Aurelia.

  “You know, Jenny. Have you fallen off the roof yet? It happened to me three times already.”

  “Aurelia, why do you keep climbing up there if you keep falling off?”

  She kept looking at me like she thought I was missing something big. Finally she plain came out and asked it. “Did you get your period yet? Your Great-Aunt Flo? I did. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Jean had bragged all about that to me once, too, a long time ago, and said how she’d become a woman and she had to go to the store for a belt and pads because she’d started her monthly courses.

  “Oh, sure! Mama talks to me about all the girl stuff.” Which was a total lie. I hated lying to Aurelia. Just another part of me I didn’t see how I could be forgiven for.

  “What does she say?”

  “About what?”

  “The girl stuff.”

  I clamped my mouth shut. I’d gone and gotten myself into a corner. “Mostly, that only common people talk about things like that.”

  When I made the comment about common people, I happened to be parroting Mrs. Blanchard, our nurse at school. She didn’t seem too smart, but at least I could use her knowledge about this and give Mama credit.

  “Aunt Maureen says that it’s the way God made a woman to nurture babies. That it’s pure, beautiful. A part of his plan.”

  Aurelia had no reason to peer so suspicious at me just then. I expected her to say, “Who do you think you are? Royalty?” But instead she said, “You know that’s the first time you’ve ever talked to me about your mama, Jenny.”

  “There’s nothing to say about her, that’s all.”

  “What about your daddy?”

  I was more than thankful when Garland rapped on my elbow at that moment with a tattered copy of Henry Huggins and asked me to read it to him. We found a place on the stoop and I’d gotten about five pages in when Aunt Maureen started rationing out melon slices and a pack of friends showed up to arm-wrestle Darnell. I kept turning pages and reading, my voice swelling louder, trying to ignore the ruckus and the banging on the garden table.

  Garland finally gave up trying to concentrate, slammed the book shut between my hands, and went to take a turn at challenging his brother. Darnell let him win. When they finished, Darnell dangled his arm like it was helplessly mangled, like any minute it might fall off. “Garland, what you been eating for breakfast? You killed me, man.”

  Then Darnell’s eyes found mine. “What about you? You picked up any pennies lately? You feeling lucky enough to beat me?”

  “Luck doesn’t have a thing to do with it, Darnell.”

  “That so?”

  I straddled the lawn chair, rocking my weight from one foot to the other. “Sure is.”

  He scrubbed the floor with the toe of his left sneaker. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” I sat in the chair and positioned my elbow for power.

  Darnell spat and yanked his chair closer to the table. Next thing I knew, we were faced off, elbows planted, right hands adjoined, fingers braided, Darnell’s black ones a great deal larger than mine.

  “I have arms of steel,” I told him.

  “Ready. Set. GO.”

  He wasn’t doing the fake stuff with me the way he’d done with Garland. He expected to win trouble-free. I caught myself starting to rise on my feet in counterbalance. But then I set myself and made headway. Darnell muscled his way back. If he’d expected to slam my arm down, I surprised him. I gritted my teeth so hard, I thought I might break a few off. No way was I going to let him win easy.

  Suddenly, I caught the accusation in his eyes. The way he looked at me, I knew this wasn’t all about arm-wrestling. It was something more, one force pushing against another.

  “Don’t . . . know . . . why you . . . always . . . come here.” He spoke through clenched teeth, his eyes glued to our hands.

  “I . . . don’t.” I pushed so hard, my mouth flinched. “Don’t come . . . near enough.”

  His cheeks inflated with air. He looked like Howdy Doody in the pictures I’d seen at the A&P, only he was the wrong shade. “Makes . . . Aurelia . . . overstep . . . her bounds.”

  I quit. Just like that. Darnell slammed my arm down so hard he must have busted a wrist bone. He held on to his arm the same way he had after he’d wrestled Garland, but this time I think he really meant the helplessly mangled part.

  “You got nothing to say about what me and Aurelia do.”

  I was so mad that even watching him rub his arm in pain didn’t make me feel better. I goaded him about Garland. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I eat for breakfast?”

  He glared at me, still massaging his arm. “Why would I ask you a thing like that? You didn’t win.”

  I knew in my heart he didn’t like me coming around because I was white. “People are the same whether they’re one color on the outside or the other,” I said to him. Maybe I didn’t accept myself sometimes, but I sure wasn’t going to give Darnell the chance to heap it on me the way he wanted to. “There’s not much that could keep me away from my best friend.”

  When he stood up and walked away, he was still hanging onto his wrist like it was tender.

  “What’s he so testy about?” Aurelia asked when she came out of the screen door carrying silver and plates to set the table. “You almost beat him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You staying for supper? Aunt Maureen’s got Gooey Butter Cake.”

  I stared after Darnell.

  “Don’t you pay him no mind. He’s just jealous because you got a big-time job is all. All he does for money is put together boxes for the hatchery down the street. Folding and stapling boxes to ship chickens. He even pokes holes in them so the chicks can breathe.”

  “That’s not such a bad job.”

  I cast about for my belongings—my headband and a coin purse. All of a sudden I got the feeling I’d stayed way too long.

  “You were going to do black cats,” Aurelia reminded me.

  “I can’t.”

  “Come on!” she begged. “We’re putting on pajamas and climbing out to the roof to watch the fireworks over the river. We’re going to watch every show they shoot off over the Mississippi. Can’t you stay?”

  “You’re climbing out on the roof again?” I raised my eyebrows, teasing her.

  By the way she grinned, she knew where I was headed before I got it out.

  We were just two girls again, whispering indiscreetly about Great-Aunt Flo. We shook our heads and shrieked at the same time.

  “Why do you keep climbing up there if you keep falling off?”

  We got to laughing so hard, I forgot all about Darnell.

  Chapter Nine

  It was Aurelia’s idea to sneak onto the entertainment boat so we could listen to her daddy playing the horn. They called their band the Six Blue Notes, and the more time they racked up playing weekends on the Admiral, Aurelia told me, the more impressive they became.

  Playing the trumpet wasn’t Eddie Crockett’s only job. Weekdays, he ran a metal punch at the factory, punching out sections to build stoves. On weekends, I saw him use the scrap metal he’d brought home and shape it, at a workbench not much different from Miss Shaw’s, into trumpet mouthpieces. Every musician I saw begged them off of him. Eddie Crockett told me it was a thing with horn-blowers. Every musician he knew worried with a sore mouth. He liked to
build his valves very thin and very deep, to make it easier on a player’s lips and give a big, warm, round sound at the same time.

  He had a way of twisting and lightening the spring action of trumpet pumps so a horn would sound altogether different. One afternoon he even showed me how he could make the refrain of a song sound like it was a woman calling.

  I got lots more time visiting with the Crocketts than I’d expected because, thankfully, Daddy’s job pulling posts and breaking mortar lasted a full twenty days. They even had him working on weekends.

  The humidity pooled over our town, and the sidewalk seared your feet and you felt like you were being steamed alive when you walked around St. Louis. But I felt happy.

  Most mornings, I worked for Miss Shaw. She’d been so satisfied with my work that she’d offered me more days at the store. Daddy came home late every night and, when he did, he was so worn out from smashing cement in the heat, he was too tired to mess with us. And no matter how Darnell shoved past me when I showed up in the Crocketts’ front yard, no matter how he hit toward me when we played stickball to show me I was a weak spot, or how he glared at me with the same sharp focus as the sun caught in the magnifier when Garland had about set the whole yard on fire, I chose to ignore him.

  Nobody with such an attitude was going to take Aurelia away from me.

  I saw plenty of liveliness those days in the Ville. I met people with names like T. Bone Finney and Chick Randle, and one of Aurelia’s friends taught us how to dance. (No need to jerk around like a housefly, girl, I remember she said. Move like you’re writing cursive on the wall with your backside.) And Aurelia and I found a stray dog and fed it some water and a pork steak before Eddie Crockett shooed it away.

  Every place I went, I kept finding pennies. I found one the day I played second base and the ball buzzed my head. Darnell had hit toward me again and I took off running, but I sidled back fast when the outfielder snagged it clean. Next thing I knew, the ball came soaring toward me. I leapt, bobbled it, and came down empty-handed in time to see Darnell make a standup double. And there in the dirt, of which I had a mouthful, laid the penny. I sat up, dusted myself off and turned the penny over in my hand, remembering that Reverend Monroe had said how much I was loved.