Lucky Penny

Lucky Penny

            Vicki hadn’t planned on doing anything the day Rhonda called her, to see if maybe she wanted to get out of the house, and ride along with her to Topeka to get the tag for her new car, and for some reason she said that yes, she would go along. It had been a long three weeks since she had been out of her house, besides work, and maybe a little car trip might feel good in some way. Maybe if she was around someone who made her laugh, she could stop crying, if only for awhile. And Rhonda was usually pretty good at making everyone laugh, most of all Vicki.

              Near silence filled the car on the trip into town, not because Rhonda wasn’t trying to stir up conversation, she tried several times to spark up a little small talk along the way, but Vicki just replied with one-word answers and head nods. She was thinking the trip was maybe a mistake, that she really wasn’t in the mood or any shape to be around anyone who was going to try to cheer her up three weeks after her dear brother had passed away. She just wasn’t in the mood to be happy. Anyone who has mourned someone extremely close to them knows that after you spend a fair amount of time feeling like hell, you kind of get to he point where you know that time will heal, but you would rather feel empty inside. After all of that time, it feels like that is all that you know. It’s almost as if sad is the only way you know how to act.

              Rick had been two years younger than Vicki, her little brother almost all of her life, she had been there for his birth (not in the room, but at the hospital, with her grandmother), she had been there for him through three trips of chemotherapy followed by radiation in Kansas City, and she had been there to donate her stem cells (Rick and Vicki had been a ninety-eight percent cross-match) and she had been with him the last three weeks of his life, when he had been diagnosed with some crazy shot-in-the-dark sickness that only occurs in Leukemia patients and very young children. She had been there the exact moment Rick had passed away.

              They had talked a lot in that last year, especially in the last few weeks when it seemed like the end was near, and Rick was tired all the time, his blood cells just disintegrating inside of him, and he was putting weight on, almost ballooning up before her eyes. They had talked about the times they had spent growing up in the house on the Delaware River, when Rick and their older brother Bill used to bring home baby animals that they had snatched from their dens and nests. Baby raccoons (coons, they had called them) and little cute barn owls with their big round eyes and 360 degree spinning heads were the main subjects of their live-hunting sprees.

         They had talked about their crazy mother, and all of the hell she had put them through while they were growing up. They had talked about the parade of drunks and all-out losers she had brought home and how they might have had a better chance with no mother at all. They both had agreed that at least the old hag had somehow kept them all together.

         They talked about their religious lives, how they had both been raised Catholic, even gone to Catholic school for awhile, and how they had both fallen away from not necessarily the beliefs, but the order of it all. Neither had, after all chosen to raise their children Catholic.

         They talked about how they had collected the old wheat back pennies, had gone all out nuts at the instance when one of them found one. For some reason, probably since the pennies were discontinued, they thought that the old coins would be worth something some day. So, they had a running competition to see who could find the most and the oldest pennies in circulation. You see, today, you can look in just about any public place, around a vending machine somewhere and find a few pennies just lying around, apparently not worth picking up anymore, but when Vicki and Rick were kids, that was not the case. You had to find those little bastards in circulation. Sure, they ended up spending a few of them, when they really needed some string for trapping baby coons, but for the most part it was just like any other sport; it was the thrill of the hunt and the bragging rights that were priority numero uno.

          All the way down the Interstate, watching the bluestem covered Flint Hills blow by, Vicki kept thinking about the last night she had with her brother, and what they had said about life after death; what may or may not happen to them after they died. Rick was in bad shape at this point, shaking like a dog shitting a log chain most of the time, but his sister stayed by his side, holding him, crying with him, and talking.

          “I don’t know what I believe anymore, sis, about all of that life in eternity stuff, but if there is a way I can tell you, or show you somehow, after I find out, I promise, I swear I’ll do it,” he had said to her, his eyes bloodshot and full of hot tears.

        “ I know, Rick, I know you will,” She ran a hand down his bearded face, her other arm cradling his head on the couch. She knew that she had to get on the phone at that point, because Rick was about to go, any moment, she thought, and so she did. She calied both of Rick’s daughters, her husband Mike, and Big Brother Bill.

          In the early morning hours that night, Rick passed on, surrounded by his family and loved ones, and Vicki was right there, holding his hand along the way. Immediately after Rick died, seconds really, a dog appeared on the deck of the trailer, howling, looking up and howling like his nuts were caught in a bear trap. It took a lot of yelling and chasing, but the dog finally slinked off into the wilderness along Lake Perry, his howls fading slowly into the distance.

         Finally, Rhonda wheeled her little Kia into a parking space in front of the Shawnee County Courthouse, they both got out, and Vicki wiped some moisture from her eyes while Rhonda fed the parking meter. It was that howl, that high pitched whine of the dog that still put goose-bumps on the back of her neck. Rhonda put a reassuring arm around her friend, and tried to comfort her a little.
        “I’m okay, I just…,” Vicki trailed off, and started down the sidewalk toward the front courthouse steps. She lit up a smoke and that was when she saw it, while she was looking down at her lighter, she somehow looked past the lighter, and saw a little piece of dull copper, lying on the sidewalk. She took a drag off of her Marlboro and bent over to pick the relic up, but the feeling hit her halfway down, when she noticed two pieces of wheat rising up around the dull but still readable “one cent” stamped in the middle.
          “I’ll be damned…,” Vicki said as she trailed off for the second time in the last minute or so. She flipped the coin over in her hand, tossing it up an inch or two in the air, just enough to let it land “head’s up” in her palm. That’s when the feeling, the goose-bumps, and a cold sweat hit her brow and a feeling of someone sticking a hand in her gut and giving her innards a good twist really hit her. Then it was total serenity. Rhonda saw her friend smile for the first time in weeks,  and she was doing it all while looking ghostly white.
          “What is it, Vick?, “ Rhonda beckoned, smiling herself, mostly from seeing her friend’s smile after so much sadness lately.
Vicki clasped the penny in her hand until her knuckles were white, got alongside Rhonda and opened the fortified compound that her left hand had become.
        “Look! I found this right here on the ground!” said Vicki, sure her friend would catch the drift. Vicki was smiling ear to ear now, and the relief she felt showed on her face, and in the way her shoulders weren’t held so tight to her body. “Look, it’s a wheat-back, Rhonda, and look on the front, it was minted in nineteen fifty-three. The same year Rick was born.”