“He said noon tomorrow.”

The clock on my kitchen wall struck three.

We had twenty-one hours left before the county audit software locked every unpaid account in Oak Creek.

All around my knees, twelve thousand shiny coins lay across the living room rug in messy heaps.

I scraped thirty coins off the rug with a plastic spatula, dropped them into my tote, and drove straight to Oak Creek First Bank.

Marge Miller stood behind window three in a pressed yellow blouse, tapping her ballpoint on the glass divider as she went through a stack of commercial deposit slips.